“We’re already planning a world tour for you guys when you get back. Over forty-eight days you will visit thirty-five countries, meeting key groups of press, television, scientists, students, and educators, as well as politicians. You’ll go to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, England…

“We set a couple of broad guidelines for the media stations around the world, a long way back in the mission planning. First, of course, Ares represents man on Mars, it’s a culmination of an age-old dream, it’s in the nature of man to accept difficult challenges, blah-blah, all of that stuff. And then, historically, Ares is built on the achievement of many scientists, Newton and Goddard and von Braun. You know the score. And today Ares has a strong international flavor, with the overseas investigators, the open access to samples and data, the tracking stations around the world, the assistance from the Russians in your training, and so on. Additionally, of course, space is benefiting man — you have a lot of stuff here about the spin-offs — and you have the hope that Ares, spectacular off-Earth achievement as it is, represents a promise that man may eventually use his technologies to resolve the Earth’s intractable problems…”

Ares, as the shop window for technocratic solutions, York thought sourly. Jorge was right. It’s turned out just like Apollo after all.

But today the mood was a little darker than in the 1960s. Today, you had Reagan’s Star Wars talk, of particle beams and lasers and smart bullets. Space was again an arena for flexing national muscles. And Ares was being used, blatantly, by the Reagan administration to appease national and international sensibilities about the aggressive use of space technology.

Ares had become twinned with the Star Wars initiative in the media. Ares was the dreaming half of the U.S. space program, coupled to its threatening sibling. Maybe that had been the administration’s intention all along, when they approved Joe Muldoon’s reshaping of the mission back in ’81.

She could see the hand of Fred Michaels in this, still pulling strings, even from his retirement in Dallas. Michaels had locked Ares together with SDI in the mind of Reagan — and the public and Congress. As long as Reagan kept on pumping billions of dollars into military spending, some of that was going to flow into NASA, to sustain Ares. It was smart footwork by Michaels. Even if it was, she reflected, completely amoral. Do anything, say anything — just keep the mission progressing.

Meanwhile, every news item about her mission — every gimmick, every toy, every image — had multiple meanings, she saw: Ares, as a geopolitical symbol; Ares, as an ad for technocracy.

It would probably always be like that. To gain political advantage was the only reason, really, why any government would fund travel into space.