Voyage by Stephen Baxter

Voyage begins on one of the most famous nights in world history, July 20th, 1969. President Richard Nixon is preparing to make the most famous phone call in world history to the Apollo 11 astronauts at that moment walking on the surface of the moon.

But in Stephen Baxter's story, there is another famous man in the Oval Office, eager to talking to the astronauts. His name is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It seems that the former President was both paralyzed and widowed on that day in Dallas instead of killed out right. It is that change in history that causes Baxter's story of an alternate space program to unfold.

One of the policy questions facing President Nixon around the time that Apollo 11 reached the Moon was what to do with the space program that he had inherited. Shortly after the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, a Presidential commission presented its recommendations. Apollo could be followed by voyages to Mars, a lunar base, large space stations, and finally a reusable space shuttle. However, the political class and indeed the public were very dubious about more large scale space projects. In our history, Nixon choose the space shuttle, under funded it, and over sold it as a way to keep the space program gasping along.

In Baxter's story, John Kennedy has another idea. Why not follow up the voyage to the Moon with an even more epic voyage, this time to Mars? His voice and influence sells the notion and Project Ares becomes the next great space project.

But there is a price. Apollo 14 would be the last voyage to the Moon. Many of the famous robotic probes we know of, such as the Voyager missions to the Outer Planets, would never be launched. Curiously, Skylab remains and is used throughout the 1970s. There is also a Skylab-type space station in lunar orbit called Moonlab.

There follows an epic story of bureaucratic infighting and technological adventure. There is a Challenger-style accident that threatens the program. But the mission launches anyway, one bright morning in the mid 1980s.

Voyage has a number of flaws. First, the narrative jumps willy nilly between the story of the actual voyage to Mars and the story of the decade and a half long program to put the mission together. This causes a little head snapping confusion as one tries to keep the two parallel stories straight.

Where Voyage stumbles, though, is historical plausibility. Would being put in a wheel chair really cause President Kennedy not to run for a second term? It seems to the reviewer that Franklin Roosevelt handled being President from a wheel chair just fine.

Also, the outside flow of history seems unaffected by a humans to Mars project going on. Everything else, including terms of Presidents (though apparently Teddy Kennedy is Jimmy Carter's Vice President in the place of the virulently anti-space Walter Mondale) and world events, happen on schedule.

Just having JFK survive as a kind of gray eminence in the Democratic Party would change American political history in ways that would have been fun to speculate, besides just having his brother being Veep.

Also, the idea of Kennedy surviving into the 1980s (he's there to celebrate the launch of the Ares) might stretch credibility. Between his Addison's Disease and the horrific combination of drugs, including massive doses of steroids, he was taking, one would wonder if he would live much beyond Dallas in any case.

Also, there is some doubt that Kennedy was all that big a space enthusiast. A tape surfaced, after the publication of Voyage, of Kennedy blurting out to then NASA Administrator James Webb that he was not all that enamored of the space program and that the main purpose of Apollo was beating the Russians. Of course, it has also been argued the he became a space fan afterwards.

The book ends just at the first foot steps, when a female astronaut puts her boot prints in the Martian soil and speaks the first words. By then, the story is winding down on a melancholy note. It is implied that the voyage of the Ares may well be the last great space expedition for the foreseeable future. Perhaps, with voyages to Mars still before us, we are in the most fortunate history after all.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, the reviewer is the author of his own alternate history space novel, Children of Apollo.)