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| Jacket design by Nancy Merritt |
| BACK TO THE MOON Homer H. Hickam Jr. New York: Delacorte Press, June 1999 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-385-33422-8 | ||||
| ISBN 0-385-33422-2 | 447pp. | HC | $23.95 | |
Jack Medaris, former NASA engineer, labors under a geas1: a compulsion that sets the course of his life. The death of Kate, the love of his life — for which he is blamed — drives him to the Moon. He has a more practical reason for going, too: a quest to recover 30 kilos of "fire beads" — dust containing helium-3, the key to fusion power on Earth. (A Dr. Perlman has already perfected the process, and waits at his fusion facility in Montana for the gas held by those precious beads.) The world is in desperate need of plentiful clean energy, and if Jack succeeds in his quest, he will cover himself with glory.
However, there are several rocks in that glory road.2 Fossil-fuel interests are on the point of seeing America cement the World Energy Treaty which would lock into legal concrete the use of these greenhouse-gas-emitting fuels and hence guarantee that climate change proceeds with all deliberate speed. A shadowy organization has hired Puckett Security Services to stop any significant progress in clean energy by means fair or foul. They've already destroyed Jack's Prometheus vehicle, a robot designed to fly to the Moon and retrieve those fire beads. Jack is not deterred. Planning carefully over several years, he and his allies come up with a contract signed by the Department of Transportation that gives him a legal right to use a space shuttle. Now the only obstacles are getting himself, his team, and his equipment on board a shuttle and getting it to the Moon and back. NASA, which fired him for the rocket accident that killed Kate, is not going to cooperate, and Puckett's thugs won't be sitting idle.
The story opens on 12 December 1972 at Frau Mauro, landing site of Apollo 17: last human expedition to the Moon to date. It has Harrison Schmitt (known as "Jack"), the only geologist to set foot on Lunar soil, retrieving some of the orange soil that we are told is the "fire beads" of Jack Medaris's quest.
Perlman noticed the movement to the scar. "Do you hate NASA so much, then, Jack," he asked quietly, "for what they did to you?" "I don't hate anything of anybody, Doc," Jack said grimly, "except for maybe little physicists who follow me from my hotel room when I try to get some time to myself." Jack walked under the huge "milk stool," the massive concrete pedestal on which a Saturn 1-B had once sat prior to launch. He carried a coil of rope over his shoulder. Just beyond, the Atlantic Ocean grumbled and groaned, as if providing a perpetual chorus of mourners at the tragic site. "I forbid this . . . this"—Perlman sputtered—"madness." "Go home, Doc," Jack replied calmly. "Wait for me to bring you your dirt. Then fire up your machine, show the world what you can do." – Page 33 |
Helium-3 is a stable isotope of two protons and one neutron. (Normal helium has two of each.) It is the only stable isotope having fewer neutrons than protons (other than ordinary hydrogen with one proton and zero neutrons.)
Rare on Earth, helium-3 is more plentiful on the Moon. ("Materials on the Moon's surface contain helium-3 at concentrations between 1.4 and 15 ppb in sunlit areas, and may contain concentrations as much as 50 ppb in permanently shadowed regions.") A great deal of regolith must be processed to obtain useful amounts of He-3, but the same regolith can yield other products, so the economics may work out — if we have mastered fusion reactors that burn it. They will have to run hotter than the "garden variety" fusion of deuterium and tritium, but the benefit is that fusing He-3 produces no radioactivity except for secondary reactions.
Fusing He-3 with itself produces no neutrons, only protons. The reaction supplies 12.86 MeV; fusing a few grams of the material in this way could theoretically produce 345 MWh of energy. Compared to the needs of an average town, that's not a lot. Commercial production of power from He-3, therefore, would require tons of the fuel.
Commercial fusion power based on He-3 is quite a ways off. However, it has been achieved in laboratories, and thus is a real possibility. Perhaps in another generation we will have it in hand, along with routine travel to the Moon or to the gas-giant planets where helium-3 is even more plentiful.
Jack and his team succeed in hijacking the space shuttle Columbia, which is about to launch, despite losing his pilot in the attempt in a stupid accident with a gun. One of the intended all-female crew has made it on board: payload specialist Penny High Eagle. She is a celebrity adventurer who's the author of many books about her travels, and she hoped to get a book out of this jaunt. She's also a biologist, and her presence is justified by some cell culture experiments — and by Paco, a black and white cat whose adaptation to microgravity she will study.3 Although scared and angry, she soon realizes that working with these space pirates will get her the story of a lifetime — if she survives.
After several orbits of preparation, with Houston's control replaced by transmissions from an eighteen-wheeler on the move around the Midwest, Jack and his intrepid crew remove the three SSMEs and replace them with "Big Dog," an engine that will get them into LIO. Before they can fire it, they endure a "demonstration" barrage of water balloons launched from a Pegasus spacecraft. Then comes harassment from the shuttle Endeavor flown by the all-female crew that intended to be on Columbia and commanded by the thoroughly hostile Olivia Grant.4 After the two shuttles rendezvous, Grant dons an EMU, flies over and attempts to disable the crew of Columbia with what she thinks is knockout gas. Fortunately, Virgil is just finishing up in the engine compartment. He surprises Grant and stops her at the airlock. During the struggle, the gas canister goes spinning away and explodes; turns out it was a bomb. Soon Virgil, now wearing the EMU, carries Grant back to Endeavor in a rescue bubble.
To cut to the chase, Columbia fires up its big engine, coasts to the Moon, and makes orbit. Jack makes it to the surface, collects his dirt, is rescued by Penny, and makes it back into space with Penny by hot-wiring the old Apollo 17 lander. Along the way he has to dodge a few more "rocks." Then comes the long glide back to Earth, a rough reentry, a ditching near Cuba, and one final cliff-hanger.
The knowledge Homer Hickam gained as a NASA engineer helped him make this novel plausible. However, there are still scenes that stretch credulity. One is the difficulty of changing out the shuttle's main engines (SSMEs) on orbit. Another is the question of where the fuel for Big Dog comes from. It can't be the external tank; Jack dropped that as soon as he got his hidden equipment out of the hidden compartment in its lower end. Some of the attacks, notably Olivia Grant's second go at Columbia, seem far-fetched. And I think that final cliff-hanger is one too many. Also, Hickam gets the geography of Silicon Valley really wrong (see my Errata page.)
One major theme of the novel I can get behind is the idea that a shadowy consortium of fossil-fuel companies and other interests works under the radar to delay the conversion to renewable energy — and even fusion — until they can figure some way to profit from these new sources of energy. Another thing in its favor is how it resembles Michael Flynn's Firestar, another tale of a competent and resourceful private firm running rings around NASA. But he paints Jack Medaris as too macho, and way too athletic for a rocket engineer who develops the scheme and the hardware to execute it in three years after losing his former company completely. (As the passage quoted suggests, he throws the rope over a part of the "milk stool" and climbs up it hand over hand just to get a look-see.) But this was Hickam's first novel, so I can cut him some slack. It is a good read and it held my attention.
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