Titan. Stephen Baxter

said, ‘Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with air, an atmosphere double the mass of Earth’s, mostly nitrogen, with some methane and hydrogen. The sunlight breaks down the methane into tholins – a mixture of hydrocarbons, nitriles and other polymers. That’s the orange-brown smog you can see here. Titan is an ice moon, pocked with craters, which are flooded with ethane. Crater lakes, Paula. The tholins rain out on the surface all the time; Huygens landed in a tholin slush, and we figure there is probably a layer, in some places a hundred yards thick, laid down over the dry land. Titan is an organic chemistry paradise …’

      Benacerraf felt faintly bored. ‘I know about the science, Rosenberg.’

      ‘Paula, I want you to start thinking of Titan in a different way: not as a site of some vague scientific interest, but a resource.’

      ‘Resource?’

      He began to snap out his words, precise, rehearsed. ‘Think about what we have here. Titan is an organic-synthesis machine, way off in the outer Solar System, which we can tune to serve Earthly life. It could become a factory, churning out fibres, food, any organic-chemistry product you like. Such as CHON food.’

      ‘Huh?’

      ‘Food manufactured from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Paula, we know how to do this. Generally the comets have been suggested as an off-Earth resource for such raw materials. Titan’s a hell of a lot closer than most comets, and has vastly more mass besides.’ She could not help but see how his mind was working, so clear were his speculations, so transparent his body language.

      ‘So a colony could survive there,’ she said.

      ‘More than that. You could export foodstuffs to other colonies, to the inner planets, to Earth itself.’

      She nodded. ‘Maybe. There must be cheaper ways to boost the food supply, though … What about a shorter term payoff?’

      ‘Oh, that’s easy. Helium – 3, from Saturn.’

      ‘Huh?’

      He said patiently, ‘We mine helium – 3 from Saturn’s outer atmosphere, by scooping it off, and export it to Earth, to power fusion reactors. Helium – 3 is a better fuel than deuterium. And you know the Earth-Moon system is almost barren of it.’

      She nodded slowly.

      He said, ‘And further out in time, on a bigger scale, you could start exporting Titan’s volatiles, to inner planets lacking them.’

      ‘What volatiles?’

      ‘Nitrogen,’ he said. ‘An Earth-like biosphere needs nitrogen. Mars has none; Titan has plenty.’ He looked at her closely. ‘Paula, are you following me? Titan nitrogen could be used to terraform Mars.’ He started talking more rapidly. ‘That’s why Titan is vital. We may have only one shot at this, with the technology we have available now. If we could establish some kind of beachhead on Titan, we could use it as a base, long-term, for the colonization of the rest of the System. If we don’t – hell, it might be centuries before we could assemble the resources for another shot. If ever. I’ve thought this through. I have an integrated plan, on how a colony on Titan could be used as a springboard to open up the outer System, over short, medium and long scales … I’ll give you a copy.’

      ‘Yeah.’ She was starting to feel bewildered. My God, she thought. We can’t even fly our handful of thirty-year-old spaceplanes. We’ve sent one cut-price bucket of bolts down into Titan’s atmosphere. And here is this guy, this hairy JPL wacko, talking about interplanetary commerce, terraforming the bodies of the Solar System.

      Future and past were seriously mixed up here, at JPL.

      ‘Rosenberg, don’t you think we ought to take this one step at a time? If we’re going to fly to other worlds, wouldn’t it be smarter to go somewhere closer to home? The Moon, even Mars?’

      ‘The old Tsiolkovsky plan,’ he said dismissively. ‘The von Braun scheme. Expand in an orderly way, one step at a time. But hasn’t the history of the last half-century taught us that it just won’t be like that? Paula, the Solar System is a big, empty, hostile place. You can’t envisage an orderly, progressive expansion out there; it will be more like the colonization of Polynesia – fragile ships, limping across the ocean to remote islands. And when you find somewhere friendly, you stop, colonize, and use it as a base to move on. Titan is about the friendliest island we can see; it’s resource-rich, with a shallow gravity well, and it’s a hell of a long way out from the sun. And that’s not all.’

      ‘What else?’

      ‘Paula, we think we’ve found life down there.’

      ‘I know. I read the World Weekly News.’

      He looked offended. ‘It wasn’t World Weekly News. And it was your daughter’s report … Anyhow, this changes everything. Don’t you see? Titan is the future: not just for us, the space program, but for life itself in the Solar System.’

      She looked, sideways, at his thin face, the orange light of Titan reflecting from his glasses. He didn’t look as if anybody had held him, close, maybe since his early teenage years. And here he was, trying to reach out across a billion miles, to putative beings in some murky puddle on another world.

      She’d seen people like this before, on the fringes of the space program. Mostly lonely men. Rosenberg was dreaming of an impossible future. She wondered what it was inside of him he was trying to heal by doing this.

      She felt sorry for him.

      ‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You want me to back a proposal to send another mission to Titan. Is that right? More probes – maybe some kind of sample return?’

      He was shaking his head. She sensed that this situation was about to get worse.

      ‘No. You haven’t been listening. Not another probe. People,’ he said. ‘We have to send a crewed mission to Titan. We have to send people there.’ He turned in his seat and faced her, deadly serious.

      

      ‘Rosenberg, if I’d known you were going to propose something like this –’

      ‘I know.’ He grinned, and suddenly his looks were boyish. ‘You wouldn’t have flown out. That’s why I didn’t tell you. But I’m not crazy, and I don’t want to waste your time. Just listen.’

      ‘We don’t have the technology,’ she said. ‘We probably never will.’

      ‘But we do have the technology. What the hell else are you going to do with your grounded Shuttle fleet?’

      ‘You want to use Shuttle hardware to reach Titan? Rosenberg, it’s crazy even to think of going to Saturn with chemical rockets. It would take years –’

      ‘Actually, getting there is easy. So is surviving on the surface. The hard part is coming home …’

      At a console, Rosenberg started showing her the preliminary delta-vee and propellant mass calculations he’d made; he was talking too quickly, and she tried to pay attention, following his argument.

      She listened.

      It was, of course, crazy.

      But …

      She found herself grinning. Sending people to Titan, huh?

      Well, working on a proposal like this, if it could be made to hang together at all, would be a hell of a lot more fun than trawling around the crash inquiries and consultancy circuit forever. It would put bugs up a lot of asses. Including, she thought wickedly, Jackie’s.

      In a satisfying way, in fact, her own involvement in this craziness was all Jackie’s fault.

      And, what if it all resulted in something tangible? A Titan adventure would be a peg for a lot of young imaginations, in a future which was looking enclosing and bleak. JPL might be finished. So might the Shuttle program, all of America’s first space efforts. But maybe, out of their ashes, some kind of marker to a better