by Issui Ogawa
Now Xiwangmu 5 was in a slightly inclined orbit around the moon, preparing to descend. In case an emergency required them to abort and head back to Earth, the crew had moved from Xiwangmu to the descent module. The stack had rotated 180 degrees, and the return module was parked in orbit. Now Chang’e could separate from Xiwangmu at any time. Xiwangmu’s slow rotation, necessary to passively distribute solar heat, had stopped. With the descent module’s engines pointing in the direction of travel, all that was required now was to fire them for a powered descent.
Commander Feng snapped his checklist binder shut. “Beijing Control, Chang’e. Return module separation complete. Ready for powered descent. Request permission to proceed.”
Radio waves from Chang’e sped toward a trio of data-relay satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. Feng’s voice was handed off to Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center, which at this moment was on Earth’s far side. These relay satellites allowed communication with Flight Control twenty-four hours a day. For the Apollo missions of the sixties and early seventies, NASA had been forced to construct satellite tracking stations in far-off Spain and Australia to maintain contact with its astronauts when the United States was facing away from the moon.
Ten seconds later—including the three-second lag required for radio waves to make the round-trip—the flight controller replied. “Affirmative, Chang’e. You are cleared for powered descent to Kunlun Base.”
“Roger. Beginning powered-descent sequence.” Feng turned to his passengers. “Ready?”
“Wait!” Tae was looking intently through her floating binoculars. Sohya looked out the window and saw what had caught her attention. On the surface directly below, something glinted at the dividing line between glistening dark volcanic ash and brilliant white lunar surface. Sohya could just make out a tiny cross, like rice grains laid end to end. It was Kunlun Base, in a valley southwest of Mons Hadley on the eastern limb of Mare Imbrium. NASA’s Apollo 15 had landed in this area, and this part of the moon’s northern hemisphere was familiar to the Japanese as the space between the right-hand of a pair of rabbits pounding rice paste in a mortar, and the mortar.
“I see it! It’s in focus!” cried Tae.
“Beginning powered-descent sequence. Commencing attitude maneuver.” Feng engaged the sequencer to increase lateral acceleration. The surface slipped from sight as the stack rotated. Tae puffed out her cheeks in frustration. “Just when I get it to work…”
Feng chuckled. “Too bad, we couldn’t confirm it. This one doesn’t count. You’ll have another chance on the way home.” Feng and Ma calmly continued with the landing sequence. “Attitude maneuver complete. Initiating descent burn.” Sohya felt slightly pressed into his flight couch. The binoculars landed on Tae’s chest and her body took on weight, pressing down on him. Xiwangmu was moving backward, its engines slowing its orbital velocity.
“First descent burn complete. Surface velocity, 1.6 kilometers per second. Descent angle, nominal.”
“Chang’e, please confirm correction for Imbrium mascon.”
“Beijing Control, I’ve just sent you the radar altimeter correction factors.”
“Thank you, Chang’e, we have the data. When is your next burn?”
“Beijing Control, we are looking at initiating next burn in approximately forty-five hundred seconds. Will apply correction just prior to burn. Third burn after ILS acquisition.”
“Ah…Chang’e, we’d like you to rerun your center of mass and thrust vector calculations with your backup computer. If the solutions are inconsistent, we’ll bring you in manually.”
“Roger, Beijing Control.”
This is routine for them, thought Sohya. The assurance that seemed to pervade the Chinese approach to spaceflight, from adding a passenger to using weightlessness to steady the binoculars, made it hard to believe the Chinese had flown into space for the first time early this century. This was only their fifth manned moon mission, but they had sent astronauts into low earth orbit over twenty times. The payoff in depth of experience was evident.
He glanced at Tae. She seemed to be studying every move Feng was making at the controls. Sohya spoke to her in Japanese. “Scared?”
“A little. Why do you ask?”
“You seem worried about the controls.”
“I’m sure the commander knows what he’s doing.”
So what is she looking at? thought Sohya. She can’t be interested in the flight controls or the hardware. Over the past month, Sohya had discovered that Tae was extraordinarily precocious for her age, but it was hard to believe she could grasp anything about the functioning of a spacecraft. Even Sohya found it hard to understand.
He could feel the beating of her heart through her back. His own heart was also pounding. Both of them were rather—no, very—tense. Feng and Ma were seasoned veterans, but that wasn’t the point. Watching them control the spacecraft’s descent was stressful in itself. The procedures were bafflingly complicated. One mistake and they would probably be smashed to bits on the surface or torn apart to float in fragments in space. If not, they’d undoubtedly suffocate. Just thinking about the consequences made calm impossible. Tae must have been thinking the same thing.
They watched silently. The only sounds in the capsule now were those of the commander and the flight engineer as they confirmed each adjustment.
Reducing its orbital speed caused the stack to descend. The only way to do this was to fire the engines directly against Xiwangmu’s orbital path. Firing the thrusters directly away from or toward the surface would change the shape of the orbit but would not enable them to land. So the stack was moving backward and firing its engines straight ahead.
Still, touching down was not a simple matter of using the main engines. The distance from first descent burn to landing was several thousand kilometers. With three separate burns, they had descended close to the surface from an altitude of one hundred kilometers. Once Kunlun Base reappeared on the horizon, its guidance signal would be acquired. Then the ship would gradually be brought to a vertical attitude while following the signal in toward the base.
Too close an approach to the base risked collision with the modules, so the landing site was one hundred meters away. Once the stack was positioned over the site, the engines were fired to keep it suspended. The engines would then be gradually throttled back until contact with the surface was made.
The stack was now vertical. As he lay in his flight couch, Sohya felt a hard vibration beneath his back. Tae’s body sank into his. Sohya braced to support her thirty-odd kilograms, but just as gravity seemed to have restored a small amount of weight, Commander Feng said crisply, “Touchdown.”
Sohya and Tae exchanged glances as they experienced their new weight, different from that on Earth.
“Sohya, I’m not very heavy, am I?”
“You never were, but right now you feel light as a feather.”
“Crew IV is here to greet us,” said Ma as he switched a monitor to one of the external cameras. Two figures wearing orange space suits were bounding over the surface in large skipping steps. Each odd-looking step covered five meters and lifted them off the surface for two seconds.
“So this is what one-sixth G feels like,” marveled Sohya.
“Well, we’re on the moon, you know,” replied Tae.
Her matter-of-fact response, instead of the excitement one might have expected, made Sohya burst out laughing.
[2]
MAN-MADE SATELLITES first reached Earth orbit in the 1950s. People of that era assumed that by the following century, space exploration would be in full swing. Cities would be built on the moon and Mars. Humanity would travel freely between Earth and space. Apollo 11 seemed to be the curtain-raiser for the coming space age.
But today, in 2025, fewer than forty astronauts were at work outside Earth’s atmosphere. Four out of five were in low orbit—below five hundred kilometers—at the aging and soon to be deorbited International Space Station or at the barely funded Vardhana Orbital Experimental
Facility, operated jointly by the Indian Space Research Organization and the European Space Agency. Of the remaining 20 percent, three were represented by the crew of mankind’s first manned mission to Mars, mounted by NASA and JAXA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, in 2023. But the crew had miscalculated their orbital insertion and missed the opportunity for a descent to the surface. Now they were on their way back to Earth, having accomplished little. The final three astronauts in space were the crew of Kunlun.
Humankind’s push into the solar system, a dream since the last century, had hardly begun. Two factors were behind the delay.
The first was the daunting expense. America’s Apollo program had cost $25 billion in the 1960s. Even in 2000, the cost to put a ton of payload into orbit ranged from four hundred million to one billion yen. Furthermore, the percentage of successful launches was less than satisfactory. Most launch vehicles failed to promise 99 percent safety even on paper, and the real failure rate reached several percentage points. There was certainly little prospect that anything like the one in a million odds of a catastrophic commercial-airline accident could be achieved. Enormous expense had gone into raising the safety margin of launch vehicles to where it was today. New technologies and materials were applied first and foremost to improving safety. Achieving lower operating costs took a backseat. By 2025, the cost to put a ton of payload into a three-hundred-kilometer orbit above the earth was more or less stuck at three hundred million yen.
But there was another factor, more deep-rooted and fundamental, blocking the road to space: the lack of an objective.
Why go there? During the Apollo program, there was a simple answer: to beat the enemy. In the sixties, Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and Kennedy’s United States were at the height of the Cold War. Rocket development was an urgent priority. That technology would allow direct strikes on enemy targets with nuclear warheads. Even after the development of intercontinental ballistic warheads, the motivation for space development was the pursuit of national prestige. With one launch after another, the two superpowers had embarked on a titanic struggle to seize the advantage. Development leads amounting to little more than a few months shifted back and forth. Ultimately, the Americans pulled away from their Soviet opponents and ended the competition by putting men on the moon.
Skylab. Salyut. The U.S. space shuttle. The Soviet Buran shuttle. Space Station Freedom. Orbital station Mir. Each program, successful or not, represented a boast of national strength carried out with one eye on the other superpower. But this competition had ended along with the Cold War. Other powers—Europe, Japan, India, China—caught up and began fielding their own launch vehicles. In the process, national prestige as a driver began to fade.
But by that point, the energy to reach the moon had already been exhausted.
At the turn of the century, the collapse of the Soviet Union had boosted American power. The anarchic forces of free market capitalism were in full control. Everything was evaluated from the standpoint of costs and benefits, and space exploration could not escape the reigning mood. The basic goals of scientific progress and human advancement fell by the wayside while investment was channeled to launching satellites that promised a return on investment. Internet-communications satellites. GPS satellites for car navigation. Earth-observation satellites for detailed mapping services. Earth orbit was crowded with them.
In contrast, budgets for “unprofitable” scientific missions were cut one after another, and proposals for launching manned missions were regarded as wasteful at best. Construction of the International Space Station, touted as a symbol of East-West cooperation, was delayed at the outset, thanks to Russia’s chaotic transition to capitalism. Some even mocked the ISS as a program in search of a concept. Then technical problems forced a gap in the resupply schedule by aging space shuttle and Soyuz spacecraft, and the ISS went unmanned for six months. It was a humiliating setback for a program that boasted it would deliver a continuous presence in space.
Clearly, the problem was the lack of a fundamental justification for space exploration. The barrier was the fact that humans did not truly need to leave their home planet. If funds spent on space programs were channeled to social welfare, education, promotion of international peace, and environmental preservation, the planet would be that much better for everyone. This was the position of the antiexploration faction. It was, without a doubt, a valid position.
The proexploration faction struck back with facts of their own. If making our current habitat more comfortable removed the need to go elsewhere, why did humanity spread across the planet in the first place? Since it had left the forests of Africa two million years ago, the species had constantly been on the move. The Arabs voyaged with their dhows along the coast of Africa to India. The Mongols subjugated Asia. The nations of Europe vied to send ships across the seven seas. The Japanese attempted to expand into Asia as a whole. And all despite having a place to call home. For most of its existence, Homo sapiens had been a species moving ever outward.
But there was a huge hole in this argument. It explained the motivation of those who wanted to keep moving, but it did not justify demanding help from those who preferred to stay home. Each side was talking past the other. The debate always seemed to end in pointless mutual denunciation.
And so time passed, and the species remained earthbound.
But there were those who realized that the entire debate was purely academic. As things stood, they were like islanders without a boat arguing over whether they should visit the next island. If a boat was available, those who wanted to go would go. If cost was an obstacle, all that was required was a profitable boat. With enough boats, even profitless voyages would become a possibility. That is, if there were some way to send humans into space profitably.
People had been making efforts to do that for some time. In 2001 the Russian space agency had sent a self-made millionaire to the ISS for twenty million dollars. This was neither the first nor the biggest deal of its kind. Before that, a Japanese television station had sent a journalist to Mir, and an American soft drink company had offered a ride on a spacecraft as a prize in a sales campaign. Many plans for space tourism, offering anything from a few minutes to a few hours of low-altitude spaceflight, were on the drawing boards in America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. Many of these concepts were too far-fetched to be taken seriously, but others were well within the realm of possibility.
A proposal by a Shanghai travel agency probably represented the peak of space-tourism planning. The plan was to send three tourists into space for four orbits—half a day of genuine spaceflight—using a launch vehicle and spacecraft supplied by China, which had already mounted six successful manned missions.
Then just before the launch, the plan collapsed. The Chinese government’s condition for using the Chang’e spacecraft for a civilian flight was that the launch be combined with the testing of a device—a weapon, according to some rumors—that was to be attached to the exterior of the spacecraft. At the last minute, CNSA announced that for reasons of national security, the windows of the capsule would be covered during the flight.
The three space tourists were looking forward to experiencing Yuri Gagarin’s famous words—“The Earth is blue. How wonderful…It is amazing”—and refused to accept the Chinese demand. The fare was twenty million dollars, and no one else was willing to pay such a huge sum. And that was the end of the plan.
People around the world who were waiting expectantly to see this concept move forward were extremely disappointed. The dilemma was this: the best technology was controlled by national space agencies with no interest in helping stage pleasure excursions into space. Private enterprise had the dreams and the plans but no spacecraft, and the cost to obtain one was far beyond their means. Few were willing to pay the enormous fees required, and making the business a paying proposition involved walking a very slender tightrope.
The history of commercial spaceflight planning was a succession of concepts appearing and disappearing, of p
roposals submitted and shot down. A feeling of helplessness began to overtake those who understood the situation even superficially. Perhaps national space agencies and the enormous resources they commanded really were the only way to get off the earth.
For years, resignation continued to spread. Technology advanced, nations grew richer, the time seemed ripe for reinvigorated space exploration, but the experts were unanimous: it was not yet feasible. If only the cost could come down a bit more. If only technology were slightly more advanced. If only people were a little more affluent…
Two lines on the graph—the cost of space travel and what the average person could afford to pay for it—seemed forever poised to cross, but did not. And people who dreamed of a new age waited with a forlorn hope that someone would find a way to make it happen.
But although no one had noticed, the future of space travel was about to arrive.
[3]
A SIMPLE ARM-AND-WINCH arrangement was all that was necessary to lower Chang’e onto the lunar surface next to the upright Xiwangmu 5. The operation appeared dangerous but was not unusual for this type of spacecraft. The Russians regularly used a robot arm a few tens of centimeters long to maneuver modules nearly the size of Xiwangmu into place at Mir’s spherical docking node.
The four crew members were in their suits and had finished the prebreathing period to avoid decompression sickness. Feng depressurized the command module, and one by one the new arrivals climbed through the hatch and down onto the surface of the moon. Tae was first to emerge, jumping lightly down onto the surface. Feng, Sohya, and Ma followed. Sohya watched as the occupant of the tiny orange space suit raised her arms in a long stretch.
“Wow, that was tough! My joints hurt.”
“Those are your first words? The first Japanese to set foot on the moon?”
“What?” Tae turned to look at him. Her large pupils were just visible behind her gold antiglare visor.
“There’s live television coverage of everything we say. President Gotoba sold the rights to help pay for the trip.”
