Ghosts of Space

We didn't have infinite funding in those days. The goal had been set clearly enough: explore the Solar System for potential sites of human migration. But the budget was a joke. We couldn't hire the best minds. Hell, we couldn't hire any minds. Most of our applicants were people desperate for work, an escape. It most reminded me of tales of medieval sailors, signing up for near-certain doom for the spectre of glory.

The plan was to do things cheap, fast, and dirty. We built rudimentary rockets and launched them virtually before the welding had cooled. I don't remember the names of the fatalities of those first months. There were just too many of them. Every other week, a crew of three volunteers. The first three crews exploded on the launchpad, the next eight in the air. We started to despair of even getting into orbit, not to mention the effect on the morale of our hapless, hastily trained would-be pioneers. I almost couldn't help thinking of them as anything more than chattel.

On the twelfth attempt, finally, we put a crew in near-Earth orbit. The celebration ran well into the night. The amount of data we collected dwarfed all our previous experiments. That was also the first crew whose names I bothered to remember: Bryce Howland, Joanne Preston, and Victor Reed. After two weeks in orbit, they burned to death upon attempted re-entry. They received heroes' funerals and were forgotten as we got back into the grind of new missions.

We didn't lose anyone else in orbit. For all our willingness to throw away human lives in the name of progress, it can at least be said that we learned rapidly from our mistakes. The shielding improved, we perfected our rockets and life support. Unfortunately, our unexpected success trapped us in a loop of no money. The financiers argued that since we had accomplished so much with so little, any more would be extravagance. Of course, they hadn't had to attend any of those dozens of funerals. I went to every single one.

Regardless, as the months of work stretched into years, our next step loomed into view. First, the Moon, then, a planet. After losing two more crews in attempted landings, we successfully set foot on our satellite. Once again the influx of data, the celebrations, the endless hours of analysis. While what we learned was fascinating, we quickly saw the futility of trying to colonize a place with no atmosphere. The scientific missions continued, and even garnered additional funding from mining interests, but those of us in charge of the main mission were now faced with a choice: Venus or Mars.

We knew little about either. Venus is certainly closer and as far as we knew had some kind of atmosphere, but we were concerned about its proximity to the Sun. Mars posed no such threat, but would be a much longer trip, and there was essentially nothing we could say about its environment. We debated for days, finally settling on two points: we would go to Venus because it was closer, and we would only send one person. We were not optimistic about that person's chances of returning.

We hadn't had any fatalities in so long that it was once again easy to find volunteers. When I saw the list of options, I was hardly surprised to see the name of Susan Burton. I had been keenly aware of Susan even since her days in training. Where most people who came to us were unenlightened, sometimes downright boorish, and clearly seeking to escape dreary, dead-end lives, Susan bore herself with a quiet charm and grace that spoke of a deeper longing to see unknown worlds for the sake of satisfying a burning curiosity. She was a true explorer, and she caught my attention immediately. Susan was also one of the few people we thought of as veterans, having completed three moon missions successfully. When I saw that list, I knew instantly that she was the right candidate. Convincing the other directors was a trivial matter.

Susan's ship was the best we had produced thus far. Getting her into orbit and launching in the direction of Venus using Earth as a slingshot went as smoothly as any mission to date. Her trip took a mere few days, passed in quiet anticipation. Once she arrived in the orbit of Venus, telemetry clearly indicated the presence of an atmosphere, although it was not sophisticated enough to indicate composition. The board promptly reached the decision to attempt a landing, spurred by Susan herself.

Susan became aware that something was wrong as soon as she entered the top of the thermosphere. She said the air around the ship sounded like a horde of demons trying to claw its way in. The instruments blared rapid outer hull degradation, so Susan promptly put on her space suit and sought an explanation. Once she hit the mesosphere, she was violently tossed about by winds that the panel measured as being stronger than a class 5 hurricane. By this time, the hull had broken apart and the atmosphere had found its way to the cockpit and instrument panel. It read out clearly on the gas chromatograph as sulfuric acid. All of us immediately understood what that meant. As the radio feed failed under the corrosion of the gas, we heard Susan's shrieks of anguish, her suit and skin beginning to melt as her lungs burned.

I walked out of the control room that day in a blind daze. No crew member's death had ever hit me so hard. I didn't know Susan all that well, but I cared about her. She was different. She stood out. Of all the people who had died in our vast and vainglorious project - most of them forgotten names, a select few remembered faces - of all those tragic deaths, hers was the first one to hurt.

I could not muster the energy to send the directors my letter of resignation until a week later. Something inside me had snapped. I could no longer be a silent party, a willing contributor even, to what amounted to the wanton murder of dozens of unwitting victims. That is how I had come to see our crews during that week's lonely vigil in my apartment with their ghosts and four bottles of whiskey. Their vague, nameless disapproval spurred my grief and guilt. In their midst, the bright, placid face of Susan as I last remembered it when she boarded the spaceship glowed behind my eyelids while her dying screams echoed in my ears.

After months of mourning, punctuated by an all-too-familiar burial with an empty grave, I formed the crusade for ethical space exploration. Our numbers were small. Several mid-level members of the program joined me, but the remaining board condemned me biliously. I didn't care. Colleagues, friends, even a couple of lovers; it didn't matter. They were now the enemy, hardly more than butchers in my eyes. I went after them with the singlemindedness of the unfortunate who has lost everything. Every day became a litany of meetings, negotiations, pleas, bargains, threats, cajoling and begging. I made a few new powerful friends, and a host of enemies beyond imagining. I gave my cause all I had, because the cause was all I had left.

Finally, five years later, Congress reformed the agency to require unmanned missions as a first step of exploration, despite the tenfold increase in cost. In that time, twenty more explorers, hapless souls throwing their lives away in an unnecessary waste for the greater good, perished in attempts to explore Mars. I memorized each of their names, though I never met a one of them. I see their faces, learned from photographs, in my sleep. And standing in front of them, always, smiling ruefully and with just a hint of hurt accusation, I see Susan. Only now, I can look her in the eye and smile back in peace.