Today’s burgeoning space technology ramps into the future to the Aquila Mission, sending a crew to deep space to study asteroid Bennu and comet 125P. The international mission is billed to pave the path to landing a crew on Mars. Aquila takes years to design, build, and to train the crew of two men and two women.

Launch date 2023.

The mission unfolds with the realism of nonfiction but with fictional characters to bring it to life. The crew members are veterans of long duration ISS missions. Commander Coby Brewster has influence in the selection of a crew with key abilities. Pilot Vik Ivanov is a renowned aeronautical engineer. Abby Denton is a flight surgeon. Ellie Accardi is an astrogeologist. Backup Commander Robert Trask secretly carries a deadly resentment. The Aquila crew faces certain disaster on this thirteen-month voyage. They find their true strength in their ties to one another. Their discoveries open a new page in the history of human space flight...

...After a forty-four year hiatus since the landing of Apollo 17, we have now developed the technology to send a crew to deep space beyond the Earth-Moon system, to boldly go where only robots have gone before. We have not sent a crew beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo. We do have significant technology dedicated to crew habitat systems and long duration life support on the International Space Station (ISS). Technology today enables crewed deep space missions but we need vision and commitment to fund such a mission. We will look at heavy lift vehicles, crew modules, and mission costs. Science objectives are important to justify any deep space mission. The main purpose of this book is to propose the Aquila Mission, a crewed asteroid and comet rendezvous mission. Such a mission could be the first to send a crew to a heavenly body beyond the Earth-Moon system. This mission would serve as a necessary intermediate step to landing a crew on Mars.
On September 12, 1962 President John F. Kennedy gave the “We choose to go to the moon” speech. When? By the end of the 1960s! That gave America eight years to accomplish the goal. We had not yet developed the technology and had not even sent John Glenn to orbit the Earth! Apollo crew missions to the Moon were accomplished on schedule and were perhaps the greatest achievement of humankind to date.
The Apollo 8 mission preceded the Apollo 11 crew landing but was arguably the single most daring and aggressive crew mission in space history. Apollo 8 had the first crew to launch on a Saturn V booster. Apollo 8 had the first crew to leave Earth orbit. Apollo 8 had the first crew to enter orbit around another body in the solar system. Apollo 8 had the first crew to restart the Command/Service Module main engine to leave lunar orbit for return to Earth. Apollo 8 had the first crew to navigate back to Earth and reenter the thin blue line of Earth’s atmosphere at over 40,000 km per hour.
The proposed Aquila Mission crew will endure greater risks and set a bold new series of mission firsts beyond the Earth-Moon system...

...The Altair is in a hypervelocity Earth approach vector... It sounds so easy, all they had to do was aerobrake on one pass, loop around the Moon, then come back to Earth slower so they could use the heat shield reentry to get them home as designed.
“AMP-15 command set. Trim burn in three, two, one… Atmosphere skip corridor countdown 2:28… 2:27… We can see the California coast. The blue Pacific looks real inviting… We’ll leave some fireworks for the recovery task force… 1:59… See you guys in a few days on the next time around… 1:24… I can taste a cheeseburger and a cold beer… twelve, eleven, ten… Some shaking now… We see fireworks all around us…”
Commander Brewster reports, “Computer malfunction… I’ve got red lights! Negative AMP-15!”
“Houston, we’re too steep! Shield temperature is redlined at 3750 and climbing! Alarm 5! Alarm 5! S***! We’re cooked!”
“Altair, Houston. End simulation.”