Free Space by Stephen Baxter

sponsorship from the Europeans and Japanese for that. The U.S. government ought to contribute, too."
    You make it sound so easy, Colonel Malenfant... "Why should these organizations back you? We haven't sent a human into orbit, other than as a passenger of NASDA or ESA, in twenty years."
    "Otherwise," said Malenfant, "we'll have to let the Japanese do this alone."
    "True."
    "Also there'll be a lot of media interest. It will be a hell of a stunt."
    "A stunt is right," she said. "It would be a spectacular one-shot. Just like Apollo. And look where that got us."
    "To the Moon," he said severely, "forty years before the Japanese."
    She chose her next words carefully. "Colonel Malenfant, you must be aware that it will be difficult for me to support you."
    He eyed her. "I know I'm thought of as an obsessive. Twenty years after the shuttle was grounded, I'm still working out a kind of long, lingering disappointment about the shape of my career. I want to pursue this Gaijin hypothesis because I'm obsessed with them, because I want America to get back into space. I have an agenda. Right?"
    "I... Yes. I guess so. I'm sorry."
    "Hell, don't be. It's true. I was never too good at the politics here. Not even in the Astronaut Office. I never got into any of the cliques: the spacewalkers, the sports fans, the commanders, the bubbas who hung out at Molly's Pub. I was never interested enough. Even the Russians mistrusted me because I wasn't enough of a team player." He slapped his leathery hand on her desk. "But the Gaijin are here. Sally, I've waited ten years for our government, any government, to act on that lunar infrared evidence. Only Frank Paulis responded -- a private individual, with that one damn probe. Now, I've decided to do something about it, before I drop dead."
    "How far away is the solar focus?"
    "A thousand astronomical units." A thousand times as far as the distance between Earth and the Sun.
    She whistled. "You're crazy."
    "Sure." He grinned, showing even, rebuilt teeth. "Now tell me how to do it. Treat it as an exercise, if you like. A thought experiment."
    "Do you have an astronaut in mind?" she said dryly.
    His grin widened. "Me."
     
    Dark, crumpled ground, a horizon that was pin-sharp and looked close enough to touch, a sky full of stars dominated by a single bright spark...
    Maura felt herself lurch as the probe began to make its way across the folded-over asteroid earth. She saw pitons and tethers lance out ahead of her field of view, extruding and hauling back, tugging the robot this way and that. Her viewpoint swiveled up and down, and some augmentation routine in the virtual generators was tickling her hindbrain, making her feel as if she was riding right along with the robot over this choppy, rocky sea. With a subvocalized command, she told the software to cut it out; some special effects she could live without.
    Xenia whispered to her audience of VIPs. "As we move we're being extremely cautious. The surface gravity is even weaker than you might expect for a body this size. Remember this 'dumbbell asteroid' is a contact binary, a compound body; imagine two pool balls snuggled up against each other, spinning around their point of contact. We're a fly crawling over the far side of one of those pool balls. The dumbbell is spinning pretty rapidly, and here, at the pole, centrifugal force almost cancels out the gravity. But we modeled all these situations; Bruno knows what he's doing. Just sit tight and enjoy the ride."
    And now something was looming beyond that close horizon. It was like the rise of a moon -- but this moon was small and dark and battered, a twin of the world over which she crawled. It was the other lobe of the dumbbell.
    "We're studying the ground as we travel," Xenia said. "As we don't know what to look for, we've carried broad-spectrum surveying equipment. For instance, if the Gaijin came here to extract light metals such as aluminum, magnesium, or titanium, they would most likely have used