Mars, Inc.: The Billionaire's Club

by Ben Bova

  “I’m retired,” said Bart Rutherford, kicking off his loafers and stretching out on the reclining chair.

  He and Thrasher were sitting on the back deck of Rutherford’s home, a deceptively modest-looking frame house perched on a rugged hillside overlooking the blue Pacific. Surf was rolling up to a slim crescent of a beach nestled among the hills. Thrasher could see a gaggle of young surfers riding the waves while slim young girls in bikinis stood on the sand admiring them.

  “It must be nice, taking life easy,” Thrasher said. He was sitting beside Rutherford, glad that he’d had the sense to wear a leather jacket. The wind coming in off the ocean was chilly, despite the bright sunshine. Thrasher remembered Mark Twain’s comment that the coldest winter he’d ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco.

  Rutherford seemed impervious to the chill, in cut-off jeans and a baggy T-shirt. He looked like an aging surfer himself: broad shoulders, fuzz-covered barrel chest, long, wavy blond hair speckled with silver, two days of stubble covering his jaw. He was sipping at a tall glass of iced tea. Thrasher wished he had a hot cup of coffee to warm his hands. He could understand why Irish coffee was invented in the Bay area.

  “I hear you’re running a project to send people to Mars,” Rutherford said casually, his eyes on the surfers.

  “Jessie Margulis is running the show,” said Thrasher. “I’m just the president and CEO. You know Jessie?”

  With a nod, Rutherford said, “Top-flight guy.”

  “I’d like to ask you a question,” Thrasher said.

  “If it’s about Mars, the answer is no.”

  Then why’d you agree to see me? Thrasher wondered silently. Curiosity? Boredom?

  Aloud, he replied, “No, nothing to do with Mars. I was just wondering why somebody hasn’t designed a rocket system for commercial air transportation.”

  “Air transportation?” Rutherford’s head turned away from the surfers to focus on Thrasher.

  “Point-to-point. San Francisco to Houston for instance. You could cut the travel time to half an hour or less, couldn’t you?”

  “If you could design a system that works. And works profitably.”

  “You could,” Thrasher said pointedly.

  “I’m retired.”

  Ignoring that, Thrasher said, “I figure you could start from the design you worked up for those suborbital tourist hops.”

  “Piggyback the rocket to high altitude with a carrier plane,” Rutherford mused.

  “And then light ‘er up and off she goes,” said Thrasher. “San Francisco to New York in half an hour.”

  “Isn’t Boeing working on something like that?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Or Lockheed Martin. One of them.”

  “It could be a major breakthrough in commercial aviation,” Thrasher urged. “As big a break as the changeover from prop planes to jets, back in the 1960s.”

  Almost shyly, Rutherford said, “Y’know, I’ve often wondered why nobody’s looked into that. You’re right, it could revolutionize air transportation.”

  “There’s a trillion-dollar market waiting.”

  Rutherford said nothing, but his eyes had a faraway look now.

  “How’d you like to look into it?”

  “Could be fun.”

  “More fun than sitting on your back porch and watching the kids surfing.”

  Rutherford stared at Thrasher with new respect in his eyes. “Where would you fit into it?”

  “Me?” Thrasher felt surprised by the question. “I’ve got my hands full with the Mars program.”

  “So you’re just handing me the idea? No strings?”

  “No strings. I couldn’t get involved in it, all my money’s tied up with Mars.”

  “There’s an old saying about being wary of Greeks bearing gifts.”

  “I’m not Greek. I just want to stop spending half my life on airplanes. I need to get from here to there a lot faster.”

  Rutherford nodded. “I’ll think about it. It’s an interesting challenge.”

  “Great,” said Thrasher. He got to his feet. Rutherford stood up, too, towering over Thrasher’s stumpy form.

  Looking up at him, Thrasher said, “Let me know what you think, will you? Maybe we can work something out with Orbital Sciences or Boeing.”

  “What’s this ‘we,’ white man?” Rutherford joked.

  “Aw, I’ll keep a finger in the pie, I guess.”

  Gripping Thrasher’s shoulder with a heavy, muscular hand, Rutherford said, “If I get involved in this—and that’s a big if—I know enough people in the industry to get a working group going.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I’ll see to it that you’re included, one way or the other.”

  “Don’t expect anything from me except advice.”

  “Good enough.”

  Rutherford walked Thrasher through the quiet, neatly furnished house to the front door, where his car and chauffeur were waiting.

  “Where are you off to now?”

  Thrasher answered, “Houston. Home base. It’ll take me damned near three hours to get there.”

  “Maybe I can do something about that,” Rutherford mused.

  “I bet you can.”

  3

  HOUSTON

  As his executive Learjet winged high above the granite peaks of the Rockies, with scattered pockets of snow melting in the springtime sun, Thrasher phoned Linda, at his office.

  “I’ll be home in two and a half hours, if our flight plan holds up.”

  Linda nodded. “We’re expecting some thunderstorms.”

  “That might delay me.”

  “Likely so.”

  “Don’t wait for me. Go on home at the end of the business day.”

  “Are you sure? I can wait.”

  “Naw, go on home. You’ve got a life, don’t you?”

  Linda smiled bitterly. “Not much of one.”

  That surprised Thrasher. He knew she’d broken up with her live-in boyfriend a year ago, but assumed she had plenty of other guys chasing after her. She was bright, intelligent, good-looking. What’s wrong with the guys her age?

  Breaking into his thoughts, Linda said, “Victoria Zane phoned.”

  “Oh?”

  “She said she’s been trying to get you on your cell phone but you don’t return her calls.” Even in the phone’s miniature screen Thrasher could see the disapproving frown on Linda’s face.

  “You check my incoming calls, don’t you?”

  “Not the personal ones.”

  Almost squirming with discomfort, Thrasher admitted, “I guess I ought to call her back, huh?”

  “Sooner or later,” said Linda.

  “Okay, Mommy, I’ll phone her right now.”

  “Reprobate,” Linda said, but she smiled slightly as she cut the connection.

  Vicki was bubbling with enthusiasm. As soon as her happy face appeared on Thrasher’s phone screen, she announced, “They bought it! The New Yorker bought my piece about Mars, Incorporated!”

  “About Mars, Incorporated?” Thrasher didn’t know whether he should be glad or worried.

  “It’s going to be published in three weeks!”

  “I thought you were writing about the space convention.”

  “No. Your project is much more interesting. And now that you’ve publicly announced it, you won’t mind a piece in a national magazine, will you?”

  “No, not at all,” he said, silently adding, I guess. Better tell Francie about this; don’t want her blindsided.

  “I’m free this weekend,” Victoria went on. “I could fly over to Houston Friday night.”

  Thrasher’s first instinct was to talk her out of it. But his second instinct—much stronger—was more primal.

  “I’ll meet you at the airport,” he said, surprised at how cheerful he sounded. “Send me your itinerary.”

  “Sure. And I’ll send you the text of my article, too.”

  Thrasher said goodbye to her and r
ealized all over again that when there’s a conflict between a man’s brain and his gonads, the gonads almost always win.

  By the time he reached his office, no one was there but the cleaning crew. Thrasher trudged to his desk and opened up the message Victoria had sent to him.

  Mars or Bust!

  THE BILLIONAIRE’S CLUB

  A Private Program to Reach Mars

  By Victoria Zane

  An exclusive, tightly-knit group of twenty billionaires is financing a nongovernmental effort to send human explorers to the planet Mars.

  The group, which has formed a private firm called Mars, Inc., is led by Arthur David Thrasher, the founder of Thrasher Digital Corporation, a Houston-based firm that develops electronic communications systems, digital games, and other computer-related software.

  Mr. Thrasher, an owlish-eyed Texan of fifty-three who wears bolo ties and scuffed, well-worn cowboy boots, is the driving force behind the project. No billionaire himself, he has recruited twenty of the nation’s wealthiest men and women to finance the venture.

  The billionaires represent interests ranging from construction and real estate to smartphones and consumer electronics, from banking and investment to retail chain stores.

  Why Mars?

  “Mars is the frontier,” Thrasher claims. “It’s the most Earthlike planet in the solar system. And it’s close enough for us to reach. It may have harbored life. It might still harbor life-forms of some kind.”

  Thrasher isn’t talking about little green men or sci-fi monsters. He’s citing scientific speculations about microbes that might exist deep underground on Mars. The surface of the planet is an apparently barren, frozen desert, where overnight temperatures regularly plummet to a hundred degrees below zero. But belowground conditions might be warmer and more hospitable for primitive life forms.

  Why try to bypass NASA and the government’s space program?

  “The goddamned government has cut all funding for human missions beyond the International Space Station,” asserts Thrasher, who apparently cannot speak the word “government” without preceding it with “goddamned.”

  Can private industry build the rockets and other equipment needed for a human mission to Mars?

  Thrasher firmly believes so. “We know how to build rockets, there’s no big secret to that. We know how to keep people alive for a year or more aboard the International Space Station. We can do it. And we will.”

  Thrasher is also driven by a patriotic streak in his hard-driving personality. Pointing out that the People’s Republic of China plans to send Chinese astronauts to the Moon within a few years, he maintains that America can reclaim leadership in space by sending a team of Americans to Mars.

  Among his billionaire investors . . .

  Thrasher read to the end of the article, then looked up from the screen of his desktop computer.

  Not bad, he thought. It’s not really a hatchet job. If The New Yorker actually prints Vicki’s piece as she’s written it, it’ll be pretty good publicity for us.

  But then he wondered, Is publicity what we want?

  He started to call Francine Timons, then realized it was well after ten p.m., and decided to send the woman an e-mail instead, with Victoria’s article attached.

  Call me as soon as you’ve read this, he typed. We need to discuss the ramifications.

  He leaned back in his chair, took off his glasses and closed his eyes tiredly.

  Vicki will be here Friday evening, he thought. For the weekend. Maybe I’ll take her out to the house. Might as well get some use out of the place. Eight bedrooms. He grinned. Let’s see how many we can use in one weekend.

  4

  CAPE CANAVERAL

  Florida is a swamp surrounded on three sides by beaches, Thrasher reminded himself. Almost the entire state has been reworked, transformed from its natural condition into a sort of Disney World of high-rise condominiums, shopping malls, hotels and highways. There’s hardly a native species of plant or animal to be found anywhere in the state. The palm trees were brought in from Cuba, the banyans from India. Alligators are becoming an endangered species and the native panthers are on the edge of extinction.

  But still, it’s wonderful, he thought as he stood in the bright, hot morning sunshine and felt the breeze from the ocean tousling what was left of his hair. Warm and clear and clean. No wonder people come here to retire.

  Thrasher was standing at the base of a launch platform. Towering above him was a massive Delta IV booster, gleaming white in the Florida sun. A team of white-coated technicians was busily making last-minute checks at the base of the rocket.

  “It has two stages, plus a kick stage at the top for the final orbital insertion,” said Saito Yamagata, director of the International Launch Services crew. He was a short, wiry Japanese executive, dressed quite formally in a dark blue business suit. His face was lean, almost ascetic, except for his cheerful ear-to-ear grin. His English was impeccable, with a barely-discernable Oxford accent.

  Thrasher had left his jacket in the minivan that the two of them had ridden to the launch pad. He stood with his shirt collar pulled open and looked up the length of the rocket launcher; despite the polarized sunglasses he was wearing, the glare of the Sun made him squint.

  “And those are the solid rocket boosters?” he asked Yamagata, pointing.

  “Indeed. Four of them, for this launch.”

  Gesturing for Thrasher to follow him, Yamagata said, “We’d better get back to the control center. This area will be an inferno when the bird lights up.”

  Thrasher noticed that the men and women in white ILS coveralls were all clambering down from the steel platform and heading for the minivans lined up at the edge of the launch pad.

  As they walked to the nearest minivan, Thrasher asked, “How big a payload are you lifting today?”

  Yamagata replied, “It’s in the twelve-ton range, I believe. Two communications satellites and a geosynchronous one for the U.S. Air Force.”

  The control center was humming with quiet intensity as the ILS team counted down the final minutes to launch. It was a lot smaller than the sprawling seas of desks and monitor stations that Thrasher remembered from the old Space Shuttle program. Windowless, its walls were covered with display screens. Men and women hunched over their consoles, headsets clipped over their hair.

  The place was also air-conditioned to the point of chilblains, Thrasher thought. I should have brought my jacket with me from the van.

  Yamagata led him to a row of empty chairs by the rear wall. As they sat down, Thrasher watched the big screen that showed the Delta IV standing tall on the launch platform. Somehow, it looked to him as if it were alive, almost, proud, straining to get going, to leave this Earth and get out into space, where it belonged.

  Sentimental twaddle, he told himself. Still, he felt the eagerness and mounting tension as the overhead speakers announced, “One minute and counting.”

  Forty million bucks riding on that baby, he thought. Maybe more.

  Thrasher found himself silently mouthing the last few seconds of the countdown. Five . . . four . . . three . . .

  The thunder of the rocket engines shook the control center, even through its solid concrete walls. Thrasher could feel the shudder, like an earth tremor.

  “Liftoff,” came the laconic voice of the launch team’s communicator.

  The launch pad disappeared in the billowing smoke and steam. But then Thrasher saw the massive Delta IV rising out of the clouds like a skyscraper on the move, flame spurting from its rocket nozzles, climbing up, up, up. He felt his heart thumping beneath his ribs. No matter how many times I see a launch, he realized, it still gets to me. He wanted to jump up and down like a little kid. With a shock, he realized that he actually was on his feet, straining himself to keep from cheering. And Yamagata was standing beside him, fists clenched, just as excited.

  “Wow,” breathed Thrasher, as the rocket disappeared from view. “That’s something!”

  “Indeed
it is,” Yamagata agreed. He took in a deep breath, then said cheerfully, “Let’s have some lunch.”

  The cafeteria was barely half-full. Thrasher pushed his tray along the counter and picked up a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a diet Coke. He noticed that there was no sushi available; Yamagata took a salad and iced tea.

  Once they were seated at a table and had unloaded their trays, Thrasher said, “Well, from what my tech people tell me, we’re going to need at least nine Delta IV launches.”

  Yamagata bobbed his head and smiled.

  “I’m hoping we can get by with six or seven, but we’re willing to commit to nine. What’s the best price you can give us?”

  Yamagata’s smile faded. “Before we can discuss pricing, you will have to obtain permission from NASA to use the launch complex.”

  “Permission from NASA?” Thrasher snapped. “I thought you guys ran the show here.”

  Warily, almost guiltily, Yamagata replied, “We do . . . within certain limitations.”

  “Limitations?”

  “International Launch Services is a consortium of several aerospace corporations, and the governments of the United States and Japan.”

  “I know that. You offer launch services to private companies and government agencies.”

  With a patient sigh, Yamagata replied, “International Launch Services leases this facility from the United States government. The NASA Kennedy Space Center oversees our day-to-day operations, and NASA Headquarters, in Washington, controls the terms and conditions of the agreement.”

  “Washington,” Thrasher muttered darkly.

  “I have been informed that it will be necessary for you to reach an agreement with NASA Headquarters before you will be allowed to lease launch services from ILS,” said Yamagata, his expression so stiffly impassive that Thrasher thought his face might break.

  “That’s not the way you usually do business.”

  “No, it is not,” said Yamagata, almost apologetically. “But my hands are tied. You must get specific approval from Washington.”