The story sold for a couple hundred bucks to one of the science fiction magazines, Jays said he suspected for curiosity over his name alone. A novel, painfully tapped into a primitive word processor, followed soon after. He hadn’t read sf since he was a kid, but now he rediscovered that sense of time and space as a huge, pitiless landscape that had impelled him towards space in the first place.

Are you arguing for a return to space, in your books?

“I guess so. I think we need to be out there. You don’t need to know much geology to see that… On Earth, in a few thousand years the ice will be back, scraping the whole damn place down to the bedrock again, and I don’t know how we’re proposing to cope with that. And then there are other hazards, further out…”

The next big rock. The dinosaur killer.

“It’s on its way, maybe wandering in from the Belt right now, with all our names written on it… Or maybe there is some other hazard, waiting out there to bite us. But I’m not propagandizing here. This is just fiction, right? I want your beer money, not your vote.”

Laughter.

Of course, propagandizing was exactly what Jays was doing.

Jays had said on a multitude of talk shows how he was dismayed by the Shuttle program — a clumsy, compromised, primitive design, just a V-2 with air conditioning, it seemed to him — and by the lack of any serious consideration being given to any more advanced follow-up.

For the fact was there were smarter ways to get into space, to reach the Moon and beyond. For instance, orbits of spacecraft passing between the Earth and the Moon were actually unstable, because of the tweakings of the lumpy gravity fields of Earth, Moon and sun. If you gave your spacecraft the right kind of push, in the right direction, at the right time, you could use that instability to make your spacecraft drift to the Moon. It would take longer to get there than the three days it had taken him, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem, for it would be at a fraction of the cost in fuel and mass in low Earth orbit.

“Then,” he said, “once you are on the Moon, there’s oxygen, and water, and materials for rocket fuel, and materials to make glass and concrete… Once you are on the Moon, with all those resources out of Earth’s deep, heavy gravity well, hell, you can go anywhere!”

It was a vision he shared with a handful of others, inside and outside NASA: how, with a little imagination, the Solar System could, after all, be opened up for colonization, with the Moon as the key.

Unfortunately, nobody with any power, financial or political, wanted to listen. Even to somebody who had been there.