Free Legacy by David Lynn Golemon Page A

landing system that would eventually be used for all future lunar and Mars missions. The four rovers had deployed without incident. Their mission—find proof that the Moon had deposits of water embedded in its dead and lifeless soil and rock, possibly enough water to make the Moon a desirable launching platform for all future space travel.
    Since the presidential order of 2010 to curtail NASA’s intention of a manned return to the lunar surface in the next decade, it was decided to combine the exploration budgets of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA to explore the possibilities of hidden water deposits on the Moon, left there by countless encounters with the frozen speeders of space, the comets, thus justifying a return to a place America knew well.
    As the first landing spot chosen for the Peregrine program, Shackleton Crater was above all else a safe spot for the experimental rovers. Unlike the remote and preprogrammed rovers sent to Mars, John, Paul, George, and Ringo would actually be tasked to do heavy-duty work in drilling remotely from the safe plains surrounding Shackleton and operated by mission specialists from their distant confines in Pasadena and Houston. This program was a far cry from taking soil samples on Mars. Shackleton Crater was safe, soft, and conducive to success the first time out. And success was what the space program needed. Water equaled a cheaper way to get to Mars in 2025, the projected date of the first American attempt at gaining the high ground of the red planet.
    Mission parameters called for the four rovers to explore the dips and valleys of the outer crater, never venturing down its steeply sloped sides and to its deep floor. They would measure and test for any moisture content in the soil surrounding the large rock formations. This fact was a running joke for the mission planners, as they knew they would find no water at Shackleton. That would be for a later mission at the southern pole when they had conquered the problems of deep-soil drilling.
    As George, Paul, and John ran freely around the brim of the giant crater, Ringo was taking snapshots of the sky above Shackleton for GPS purposes. The programming for this had been completed at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and designed specifically for Ringo to skirt the outer rim and map the sky. The simple instructions for Ringo were to guarantee that the other three rovers stayed on mission, testing their sampling and drilling packages for telemetry relay back to Pasadena and Houston. The problem developed when a small glitch in the rover’s programming had gone undetected by a sixth-year grad student in Colorado. Ringo ’s design for traversing the lunar surface outside the brim of Shackleton was flawed and was off by a mere three feet. As the other three rovers were performing their remote-controlled tasks flawlessly, Ringo was off on its own and running dangerously close to the giant crater’s precipitous edge. As eyes 244,000 miles away watched the colorless broadcast coming from the small rover’s stationary camera atop its four-foot-wide boxed frame, the roving beetle started to slide off the powdered edge of Shackleton.
    JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
     
    At 9:10 in the morning California time, the press room was full of reporters, not because of the excitement of America’s robotic return to the Moon, but simply because it was a very slow news day. As everyone watched the rovers on four different high-definition monitors arrayed around the large press room, they saw one view go askew. The press on hand had no idea that Ringo was in the midst of what Pasadena called “a hissy fit.” Inside the mission control room, a hundred men and women who had worked on the Peregrine mission for the past ten years watched as a problem they didn’t need with the press on hand started happening right before their eyes.
    “Ooh, we have Ringo going off mission here,” said one of the men watching the telemetry board