Voyage

Voyage is a 1996 hard science fiction novel by British author Stephen Baxter. The book depicts a crewed mission to Mars as it might have been in another timeline, one where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt on him on 22 November 1963. Voyage won a Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. In 1999, it was adapted as a radio serial for BBC Radio 4 by Dirk Maggs. Plot summary The book tells the story in flashbacks during the actual Mars mission of the chronicalised history until the mission's beginning. The point of divergence for this alternate timeline happens on 22 November 1963, where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination (Jacqueline Kennedy was killed, hence the renaming of the Kennedy Space Center as the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center), but was crippled and thus incapacitated, as Lyndon B. Johnson is still sworn in. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Joe Muldoon walk on the Moon, and Nixon's "most historic phone call" is joined by a call from former President Kennedy, committing the United States to send a crewed mission to Mars, which Nixon backs as part of his fateful decision to decide the future of crewed spaceflight, instead of deciding on the Space Shuttle program as he did in our timeline. Preparations for this new goal include slashing the number of Moon landings so funding and leftover Apollo spacecraft hardware can go towards the efforts of the crewed Mars mission. Apollo 12 still lands, Apollo 13 still suffers its disaster, but Apollo 14 is crewed by the astronauts of the cancelled Apollo 15 mission to carry out the scientific experiments on the lunar surface, and is the last crewed Moon landing. At the same time, the NERVA program is revived to become the chosen Mars spacecraft development, with larger tests in Nevada, but without containment and plagued with engineering problems.