My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In contrast to my experience with Homer Hickam’s “Back to the Moon,” I quite enjoyed Stephen Baxter’s “Voyage.” As the subtitle mentions, this is a compelling alternate history of what might have been had a few key events gone differently.
To sum up the main divergences in history without spoiling anything, John F. Kennedy survives the assassination attempt but is rendered an invalid, who publicly twists Richard Nixon’s arm during the televised Apollo 11 moonwalk to redirect space exploration toward a manned landing on Mars. All moon landings after Apollo 14 (with the Apollo 15 crew and a rover!) are cancelled; the Saturn hardware repurposed to supporting a Mars initiative; and NASA never builds the Space Shuttle or the Viking Mars landers. We have then a plausible scenario for how NASA could have afforded a push toward a manned Mars landing in the mid-1980s without a massive funding increase.
Baxter gets all the details right without making the book too technically challenging to read. People with a background in space exploration history will find extra enjoyment out of the subtle twists he spins on actual quotes or events. There are even not-so-subtle homages to “our” timeline. The crew of the Mars mission decides on January 28, 1986 to name their landing craft “Challenger.” (That was the date the space shuttle Challenger was destroyed.)
Baxter increases dramatic tension via multiple, interwoven timelines. The characters are interesting but sometimes a little flat. Several of them are clearly based on historical figures but are given different names as their characters’ stories are divergent from real-life people. For example, Dr. Hans Udet looks very much like Wernher von Braun’s assistant Dr. Arthur Rudolph, and an astronaut named Joe Muldoon lands on Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong. Having historical figures intermingled with the fictional ones adds enjoyment, such as hearing John Young and Bob Crippen (the crew of the first space shuttle) act as CAPCOMs during post-Apollo missions that never actually happened.
While we get a chance to sigh at the thoughts of great events that could have been, Baxter is realistic in his assessment of the political realities of NASA and the trade-offs in the decisions that had to be made for this “flag and footprint” missions. Just as the push to land Apollo on the moon left NASA with no funding or coherent and agreed vision for expanding our manned exploration of space after the moon landings, so the hypothetical administrator of NASA in “Voyage” also mortgages the agency’s future for a one-shot attempt at a Mars landing. Perhaps space privatization in the hands of visionary entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will someday free us from the politics of making apples-and-oranges funding decisions between NASA and other domestic programs.
This was the first of Baxter’s books I have read, and I will be reading more of his works in the future.
Highly recommended for fans of space exploration and alternate history.