“That’s for sure. Just figuring out the abort options will be—”

“There may be no abort options, for long stretches of the profile,” Geena said, “But it doesn’t matter. Not this time.”

Frank eyed her. “It seems that somebody wants to go to the Moon, real bad.”

She said, “We’re all going to have to think out of the box on this. If you can make this fly, we’ll go anyhow, and accept the risk.”

Jays thumped the table. “Damn it, I’ve waited since 1961 to hear someone say that. If we’d been grown-up about the risks, accepted our casualties, we’d be orbiting fucking Jupiter by now.”

Geena saw Frank blanch. It was a common enough view, but Frank had spent a working lifetime being coached in the opposite direction. She leaned forward to cut Jays off.

“Suppose we can make the lander work. What about the rest of it?”

Frank looked warily at Jays, before turning back to Geena. “Well, we’re still in trouble. We never did build that handy Orbital Transfer Vehicle, so we got nothing to push us from Earth to Moon.”

“But we do have the PAM-Ds,” said Geena. “And the IUS.” The Payload Assist Modules and Inertial Upper Stages were small boosters carried into orbit in a Shuttle’s payload bay, to boost satellites to geosynchronous orbit, or send interplanetary probes on their way.

Jays laughed. “The ‘I’ in IUS used to stand for ‘Interim’, because it was only supposed to be operational until the OTV came along. When they found out they would be flying it in the 1990s, they figured they’d better change the name.”

Frank said, “The PAMs won’t work. Sorry. They’re spinners. That is, they depend on spinning for stabilization and thrust-vector control.”

“And we couldn’t modify them—”

“Not quickly. Besides, the performance of those solids sucks. It would make for a huge trans-lunar injection propellant load. You’d need a lot of IUSs to—”

Geena said, “What other upper stage could we use?”

Frank eyed her sceptically. “That’s the spirit. But I think we have a hole here. What we need is a Service Module like Apollo’s, or an OTV, but we don’t have either of those.”

Jays growled, “We don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“We aren’t the only players here. I remember the security briefings we got during Apollo. I’m talking about “67 or “68. The CIA got worried the Russkies were getting close to a manned circumlunar flight, because they launched this thing called a Zond and reentered it. That was why we bumped Apollo 8 up to a lunar orbit mission; it was slated as an Earth-orbit flight.”