Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  Writing is simultaneously a solitary endeavor and one that should not be undertaken alone. There are a few people without whom I absolutely would not have made it this far, and they have my deepest gratitude:

  My wife, Melissa, for her encouragement and steadfast belief in me. She has taken on more to allow me the freedom to write than any man could hope for.

  The editorial team at Baen: Toni Weisskopf, Tony Daniel, and Christopher Ruocchio. They are blessings to work with and are all I could hope for in a publisher. I am still learning there is a fine balance between giving editorial advice and letting the writer run wild, and they consistently find it.

  Further thanks go to fellow Citadel alumnus Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, retired Marine Corps aviator and NASA astronaut, for his insider’s view of living and working in space.

  Finally, Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets website was invaluable. It is the one-stop shop for anyone trying to write believable science fiction. If you want to understand the peculiarities of space travel (and much of it is peculiar), there is no better place to start.

  Now for some insight on where my head was while writing this:

  Some readers may recognize similarities between my fictional Prospector Mars mission and Inspiration Mars, a private expedition promoted by original space tourist Dennis Tito. Ambitious but feasible, it would have departed Earth this year to send two people on a flyby of the red planet. I’m not in a position to judge how realistic an idea it might have been at the time, to me it just sounded like great story fodder.

  A similar concept was studied during the Apollo days, which would have sent three astronauts on a flight around both Mars and Venus in a Skylab-type spacecraft. Neither project may have ever gotten off the ground but they certainly inspired me (puns intended).

  As of this writing, the U.S. Space Force has only been around for a year. It will certainly be some time before we start seeing crewed spacecraft patrolling in orbit, though I do believe it will become necessary as civilian space travel becomes more commonplace. At the very least, there will eventually be a need for some kind of rescue capability.

  My fictional Space Force rank structure may end up running afoul of reality, but in my defense Congress did pass a resolution in 2020 directing them to use naval ranks. I hold out hope that when the day comes for the USSF to field crewed spacecraft, they’ll come around to the fact that naval ranks just sound right in that context. Think about it: Would you rather read about a spaceship colonel, or a spaceship captain?

  Colonel Kirk, or Captain Kirk?

  Lieutenant Colonel Adama, or Commander Adama?

  General Ackbar or Admiral Ackbar? Hmm… Maybe when you get to flag rank it doesn’t matter so much (it’s a trap!).

  The parallels I’ve drawn with Chinese military expansion in the Pacific should be obvious enough. Even though our little corner of the Solar System seems like it should be big enough for all nations to share, if deep space becomes a new economic sphere then we should expect there to be some “great power” competition over it. Bad actors will inevitably emerge and will have to be confronted; that seems to be the way things always go.

  Hopefully I haven’t mangled the very few Chinese translations attempted herein too terribly. My knowledge of Mandarin is limited to whatever I stumbled into online. Finding the name “Maleko” (“Pledged to Mars”) was a happy accident and fit Max Jiang’s character perfectly. Peng Fei (“Flight of the Roc”) was another serendipitous find and sounded like a great name for a spaceborne battleship.

  Readers may also recognize a common theme I touched on in Frozen Orbit, which is the need to expand our national economy into space. It may seem like too fantastic a goal, but trans-oceanic airline service was once an indulgence of the wealthy. Today that mode of travel is commonplace. Not only can normal people afford it, it supports an untold number of businesses while directly creating jobs for tens of thousands. Mine was one of them for many years.

  I hope to see commercial spaceflight achieve the same status in my lifetime, if only so I may someday buy a ticket.