Aurora by David A. Hardy

idea what it was she was searching for .
    Meanwhile, the world changed.
    There were upheavals in Eastern Europe; the Berlin Wall came down, Communism was all but banished from the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union itself fragmented into a loose confederation of independent republics. To those space buffs who had seen a collaboration between the USSR and the USA as the only hope of a manned mission to Mars, it seemed that their dream was shattered. The “fossil life” controversy and the astounding high-resolution images from Mars Global Surveyor, which in 1999 provided indisputable evidence of water on Mars, briefly gave hope that the USA would go it alone with a manned mission, but the public—and thus the government—was divided on whether it was worth the expense.
    For a while it had seemed that NASA’s much-vaunted “faster, cheaper, better” policy of using small, unmanned probes would win the day. But the arrival and prompt disappearance of both the Polar Lander and the Climate Orbiter—switched off by little green men, jeered the media—showed clearly that, while perhaps faster and cheaper, this method was certainly not better . The losses proved a blessing in disguise for those who had always wanted humans, not machines, to be the ones to explore the red world.
    Eventually a sort of stability returned to the Soviet Republics. East–West trade flourished in an open-market economy, and somehow the European Community also settled most of its differences. The year 2001 became famous—infamous—not for bases on the Moon but for the horrific events of September 11th, and for a while all governments were side-tracked by the so-called War on Terrorism. At best it seemed that an uneasy truce existed between the nations, but eventually governments turned to the idea of an international space extravaganza to divert the eyes of the world from their own problems, to boost investment and employment in technological areas, and (the official line) to foster goodwill and cooperation among nations. Fortunately the latest Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, was in favor of space travel; the spectacular demise of the space station Mir in 2001 had left his country with an unrivalled amount of experience of living in space, but no way to use it. Putin did not like his country’s demotion from a leading power in space to an also-ran.
    A joint project was announced, involving the USA, Japan, the former Soviet States, Europe (from which the leading partner was France) and Canada, which latter, early in the twenty-first century, had tripled its spending on space research—in other words, basically the same countries as had been involved in the building of the ISS. Britain, of course, was not a partner this time around, since its governments had stubbornly refused to invest in the adventure of space—and had thus allowed some of the country’s best brains to depart abroad.
    In 2001 Aurora joined the Mars Society which, under its dynamic leader Robert Zubrin, seemed to have the requisite drive and the best ideas for a manned mission. Such was the groundswell of interest that NASA was eventually persuaded to allow some collaboration with such organizations, and even industry; multinationals became involved, noting the plethora of opportunities for sponsorship and commercial endorsements of products to be used on the first mission. For all contributions, expertise and experience were valuable; and the Mars mission was going to be expensive—though this aspect could be put into perspective by comparing it with the $12 billion spent every year in the USA and Europe on perfume, almost the amount of NASA’s budget....
    NASA, true to form, insisted on a launch date of 2028, meaning that humans would be on Mars to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
    Attempts had already been made to convert the formerly Soviet military–industrial complex to more peaceful