Muldoon wasn’t sure why Josephson was getting into the habit of taking him into his confidence. Muldoon guessed Josephson spent a lot of time making tentative calls to a host of other contacts inside NASA and out, trying, in his own way, to help Fred Michaels through this difficult time.

Josephson had said: We haven’t come up with anything. Muldoon knew that was true.

So Muldoon — already working all his waking hours on the Apollo-N investigations and organizational changes — started using the hours he should have been asleep to do his own research.

“What kind of program can we run?” he asked Phil Stone. He riffled a pile of photostats, journals, and books on his desks. “If I could eat proposals, I’d be a fat man; the one thing we’re not short of is ideas. Should we go back to the Moon and start mining it for minerals? Or maybe we should capture an asteroid, push it toward the Earth, and mine that. Maybe we can build colonies at the libration points of the Earth-Moon system. Maybe we should have factories in space, making crystals, or drugs, or perfect, seamless metal spheres. Maybe we could build huge hydroponic farms in space, where the sun always shines. Or maybe we ought to put up square miles of solar arrays, for clean power. Maybe we could mine the Earth’s upper atmosphere for lox…”

NASA wasn’t short of visionaries, and new ideas, and proposals of all sorts. But there was no unity. Historically, NASA as an organization was lousy at long-range planning; fragmentary ideas and plans came bubbling up from the bottom, from the centers, and almost all of them fell afoul of turf wars.

Stone waved a hand. “All this stuff is great, Joe. But I don’t see what’s distinctive about any of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Soviets are already ahead of us in putting together big structures in orbit, and they have more experience of long-duration spaceflight. So we’re behind before we start. Whatever we try to do in this area, the Russians ought to be able to pass us easily. And there’s something about all this, factories and power plants in orbit, that’s kind of…”

“What?”

“Lacking inspiration. It’s dour. Russian. Joe, with this stuff we’re not going anywhere; and we haven’t been anywhere since Apollo.”

“So what do we do? Some kind of stunt?”

“Go to Mars. That was the point of the last ten years anyhow, wasn’t it?”