“Have I said that?” He sat back and studied her. “I do wonder if you know what you’re asking for. With all respect.”

“You know,” Jays Malone growled, “we’re further from the fucking Moon now than we were in 1961.”

“There are certainly a lot of barriers,” Frank said. “In a way Apollo fooled us. Apollo wasn’t a lunar exploration system. All Apollo could do was deliver two guys to a place on the near side of the Moon, not too far from the equator, for three days, at a certain time in the lunar morning. And that was it, and even for that you had to fire off a Saturn V every time. There was no real expansion capability, no logical follow-on.”

“Von Braun was right,” Jays grumbled. They should have built the fucking Nova. Forty million pounds of thrust, six times the Saturn V. So big you’d have had to launch it from a barge in the Atlantic. If we had the Nova we’d have been on Mars by now.”

Oh, Christ, Geena thought. Back to the Sixties.

“We had it all,” Jays went on, “and we threw it away. You know, even when Armstrong landed on the Moon, Nixon was ripping apart the space program. NASA worked up a plan that would have had fifty people on the Moon by 1980, Americans on Mars by 1985. Instead it took twelve years after Armstrong to get the Shuttle to orbit, and NASA could start campaigning for the next step, the Space Station.”

“A reason for us all to keep our jobs,” Frank said drily.

“Well, Reagan said it should be built by 1994. And there would have been an orbital transfer vehicle—”

“Yeah, the OTV,” Frank said to Geena. “Now if we had that, we really would be able to get to the Moon quickly. The OTV would have ferried people between low Earth orbit and geostationary, where they put the comsats.” He smiled. “You know, I was there when Michael Duke and Wendell Mendell had their epiphany, as they called it. They figured it takes almost the same energy to go from LEO to GEO as it does to go from LEO, all the way to the Moon. So if we had the OTV, we’d be able to get back to the Moon. That was the start of the Lunar Underground…”

Geena had actually been part of that: she’d attended a workshop in Los Alamos in 1984, and then a symposium in Washington, DC. The bright-eyed enthusiasts there, mixed in with a few Apollo-era vets like Duke and Mendell, didn’t attempt to justify a lunar return. They just assumed it would happen, probably by the mid-90s, when Station and the OTV gave the country the capability again. It was a lot of fun, even if, to Geena, most of it was utterly unrealistic.