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  I came to the edge of the stage and looked at Herc, at Izzy, at the sea of faces. All the kids I knew and those I’d never get to know.

  “No,” I said. “I’m never going to forget you. I’m still going to have e-mail, vid-chat, and all that. You guys are my friends and you always will be. Distance isn’t going to change that. One way or another I’m going to take you all with me.”

  Silence washed over the room like the ocean surf. They stared at me. The teachers stared too. Herc stood up first and raised his hands above his head. He let loose with a piercing cry. “Woooooooooot!” And then he began clapping. Hard, heavy, fast.

  Soon everyone was on their feet and there was new thunder.

  In the front row only one person wasn’t standing or applauding. Izzy was folded down into her seat, bent forward with her face in her hands. I couldn’t hear the sound of her sobs. But I felt every single one of them.

  Mars One Timeline

  By Tristan Hart

  James Madison Memorial High School

  Madison, Wisconsin

  In 2011, Dutch entrepreneurs Bas Lansdorp and Arno Wielders decided they wanted to realize their dream of establishing the first human colony on Mars. Some people thought they were nuts and said so all over social media. But the naysayers were the minority. Most people thought they were brilliant visionaries. My dad says they were a little of both, but since we’re going to Mars on their ships, apparently we are too.

  2012: Lansdorp and Wielders created Mars One, a nonprofit international corporation to facilitate the Martian colonization project. They held meetings with several major governmental and private aerospace component suppliers in the USA, Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom. This was the phase where they worked out the budget (big), timetable (short), and logistics (insanely complicated) to make their dream a reality.

  2013: The official Mars One Astronaut Selection Program was launched at a pair of press conferences in New York and Shanghai. Potential candidates were invited to apply online. Hundreds of thousands of people applied. There were several increasingly challenging layers of screening and testing to find those candidates best suited to the project. Candidates underwent physical and psychological testing and participated in solo and group challenges. The Mars One astronauts had to be able to endure the hardships, learn the science, and work as a team but also show that they could function independently. It was a lot easier to get cut from the program than to make it to the next round.

  This was when my family joined the team, but they were put on a kind of standby. They had a kid and wanted to bring me along, but the Keppleburg-Lansky Study hadn’t been released yet. If the study hadn’t come out in favor of families going, then we wouldn’t have one-way tickets to Mars.

  So, meet the family.

  My mom, Jean Stettner-Hart, is a PhD professor of mechanical engineering who’s logged a lot of time on the International Space Station (ISS) and in all kinds of low-orbit space missions. She was a contractor for NASA and advised them on their moon projects, and she worked for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. (Insider tip: SpaceX is our biggest competitor even though Mars One leases rockets and launch sites from them and hired them to build our two transit vehicles—the Muninn and the Huginn.) My dad, Cornelius Hart, is a botanist. He’s also been in space a lot, working to prove that he can grow just about anything, even in micro-g.

  2017: The candidates began full-time training, and it was really tough. During that phase the Mars One team had to identify those candidates who were the best choices to be on the first colony ship. They were separated into groups and trained in extreme locations on Earth that offer challenges as close as possible to those on the planet Mars. That included reduced-gravity training underwater and in isolation in places like a submersible, an island, and the Arctic desert.

  This was also the year the Mars One project underwent a kind of growth spurt. Instead of sending four people up in one rocket, the project was expanded to send forty in two much bigger rockets. And that’s when my parents got approval to have me come along. They told me this on my tenth birthday. Some kids get skateboards or pool parties for their birthday. I got to become an astronaut.

  2020: They launched the Mars-bound demonstration mission and the communication satellite. This was done to prove to investors—and everyone else, I guess—that the Mars One project could successfully launch a spacecraft and put it in stable orbit around Mars. The payload included the first Mars One communication satellite has since relayed videos, telemetry, and other data from the Martian surface. We learned a lot from that satellite.

  2022: Our second launch sent up a rover that’s like a more advanced version of Curiosity, which NASA launched in 2011. Ours has a whole different set of instruments and tools aboard and better communication equipment. The new rover surveyed the terrain and nearby cave systems so the mission planners could pick the best possible location to establish our colony. The rover did tons more tests on the radiation in different areas to look for ice in the Martian regolith (soil). It also explored the liquid water NASA detected on the surface of some mountain slopes.

  2024: Six cargo missions were launched. This was our main haul of equipment and supplies. The payloads included another rover, two big living units (habitats or “habs”), a couple of life-support units, and tons of food and equipment.

  2025: All of the cargo landed safely on Mars. Whew! They landed about ten kilometers from what will be our outpost. The rover located each payload and collected the equipment. Once the second rover was activated, they set up the outpost for us so that we’ll have a place to live when we get there. The rovers have all sorts of mechanical arms and are synched with autodeployment systems built into the cargo payloads. The rovers are slow, though, which is why they were sent up more than a year before we even take off. One of the most important jobs for the rovers is activating the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). Just charging the batteries that will run life support in the hab takes months. The rovers also set up solar panels to act as backups to the hab batteries. The habs themselves are inflatable, and no, they aren’t like bouncy castles you see at carnivals.

  The ECLSS will extract water from the regolith by evaporating the subsurface ice particles in an oven. The evaporated water is condensed back to its liquid state and stored. Some of the water will be used to produce oxygen. Other gasses, like nitrogen and argon, will also be collected directly from the Martian atmosphere to mix with the oxygen because what we humans breathe is nowhere near pure oxygen. It’s a mix of gasses. Earth air is 78 percent nitrogen, less than 1 percent argon, and the rest is oxygen. The ECLSS needs time to collect those gasses, mix them, and store enough for the colonists once we get there.

  The rovers will also collect tons of regolith and use it to cover the habs as radiation shielding. Mars doesn’t have an ozone layer, which means radiation is always going to be much higher. Dirt, even Martian dirt, will help keep us safe.

  2026: The first crew to land on Mars starts their journey from Earth. That’s us. The Mars Transit Vehicle will be sent up into near-Earth orbit in stages and assembled by a team at a space station called the Lucky Eight. My mom is the chief mechanical engineer—known in the biz as a “toolpush”—so she’ll oversee the assembly of the transit vehicles.

  Cargo for the second crew is launched to Mars in the same month we take off. The next wave of colonists will launch a year after we head out into the big black.

  2027: We land on Mars. Wish us luck!

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  Izzy was waiting for me by my locker, surrounded by the ninja death squad. As I went over, one of her girlfriends said something behind her hand, but Izzy shook her head. The clan of doom moved reluctantly away, but they gave me stares that I’m pretty sure took a full year off my life. I told Frick and Frack to give me a moment and they took up station across the hall.

  Izzy turned to me, shaking her head. “This is all so surreal, isn’t it?”

  “It�
��s definitely not normal,” I agreed.

  Her eyes were red from crying but she’d fixed her makeup and brushed her black hair. We hugged and when Izzy put her forehead against my chest I could feel how hot she was from crying. Then she pushed back from me, sniffed, and gave me a rueful smile.

  “All I ever do is cry,” she said. “I’m such a stereotype.”

  “You have the best heart,” I said. What I didn’t add was, and I’m breaking it. That would be too obvious, and it would be lame.

  “You were great in there,” she said. “Smart and funny.”

  “I rambled a lot.”

  “You did. A little. But everyone needed to hear that stuff, Tris.” She cocked her head. “You get that, don’t you? You get why they need to hear this from you?”

  “I think so.”

  Izzy leaned against the row of lockers. She wore a pale yellow tank top under a loose white cotton blouse, old blue jeans, and boat shoes with a flower pattern. She looked ready for a walk on a boardwalk, but Madison, Wisconsin, was a long way from the ocean. She had a few little braids hidden in the ink-black waves of her hair, which I said that I liked once, so she did that for me. She was so pretty and looking at her always made me smile.

  Well, almost always.

  “We’ve been hearing about this in the news and in homeroom for years,” she said. “Ever since we all knew you. But it’s not real, or it wasn’t, I guess. I mean, you’re here for part of the school year and part of the summer, you’re back for Christmas and Thanksgiving, but mostly you’re gone. Most of the time you’re a face on TV or on the Internet. They even sell mugs and hats and T-shirts with your face on them. The president talked about you during the State of the Union address. So . . . you’re not really real to everyone, Tris. And what you’re doing is definitely not real.”

  I started to say something but she shook her head. She wasn’t finished.

  “That all changed in there,” she said, nodding toward the open doors to the empty assembly hall. “You couldn’t have had that conversation with everyone one at a time. But somehow you managed to talk to all of us like we mattered, like we were part of it.”

  “I—”

  “And at the end? When Herc asked that question? God! I wanted to kill him because that could have messed it all up.”

  “No, it was a good question,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what I mean. It’s the question everyone’s afraid to ask you. But everyone’s wanted to ask. Even the people who don’t love you. Even people who don’t really know you. You’re going to another planet. You’re one of us but you’re leaving us forever. I know it’s hard for you and it’s scary and intimidating, but it’s hard for us, too. Not just me and Herc, but everyone. How are we supposed to think about things, about the ordinary details in our lives, about day-to-day stuff, when someone we know has left us and walked right into a history book?” She turned to rest her back against the cool metal of the locker and then kicked backward. “I’m not saying this right.”

  “Yes you are. Herc’s been saying it for weeks. I’m the ultimate story topper. I’m a hometown kid who went to live on Mars.”

  Izzy’s blue eyes searched mine. “That’s only part of it. And it’s not normal grief. Not like when Billy Carlin died.”

  Billy was a senior who’d gone to his older brother’s college frat party, gotten drunk, and then run his car into a tree at ninety miles an hour. Billy was in a coma for three weeks and then died. Billy had been one of those kids everyone thought would be something. Smart, and he knew everything about computers. Then he was gone, taking all of his potential with him and cutting all his connections with the rest of the kids at school. It was hard, and it was scary because some of the kids I knew were starting to drink. Billy’s death could have been any of them. It wasn’t the teachers, cops, and special assemblies that made nearly everybody pull back from drinking like booze was radioactive. It was the thought of Billy being killed. We all saw the car on the news.

  “I’m not dying,” I said. “And this mission isn’t me doing something irresponsible.”

  “No,” she said, her face getting a little red. “It’s you doing something they don’t understand. And stop being dense because that’s not what I’m talking about anyway. I’m trying to tell you that you helped everyone today. Saying that you’d stay in touch and all . . . that really meant something.”

  I pretended to punch buttons on my phone. “I’ll text ya.”

  “No, I mean it, I’m serious,” insisted Izzy. “You need to do what you said you’d do. You need to talk to us.”

  I nodded, getting it. “I’m playing around now, Iz, but I wasn’t messing with them. Or with you. I’m always going to stay in touch.”

  I looked around. The hall was mostly empty because the next period had already started. Frick and Frack stood like statues, their eyes staring at nothing but probably seeing everything. Not sure if they could hear our conversation or not. It bugged me that it was so hard to have any real privacy. But then again, once we left Earth we’d be leaving privacy behind too.

  Izzy’s cell tinkled to let her know she had a text. She looked at the screen, then sighed, long and heavy.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The interview?”

  She made a face that was equal parts disgust and anxiety. “The interview.”

  I sighed too.

  Mars One was funded by all sorts of donations, grants, and crowdfunding events, but the biggest chunks of money were from the producers of television shows. There are all kinds of deals in place. Some for the general mission, others based on aspects of it—there’s even a show about gardening that my dad and another botanist do. There are shows about the engineering, the philosophy, the history of Mars, and space programs in general. And on and on. More than half of the crew members have contracts for their own shows, separate from the ones directly licensed by Mars One. Like the one Izzy and I have. A lot of agents and lawyers are making a lot of money keeping it all straight. Depending on how the deals were cut, some of us are contractually required to split the income with Mars One and some are merely encouraged to be generous. Most of us are cool with donating because, hey, the more money the group has, the more supplies, modern tech, and support we’ll have on the mission. Bottom line is that without those shows we’d all be staying here on Earth watching reruns of old Star Trek episodes.

  Izzy originally said she would rather be eaten by a pack of rabid Yorkies than ever even consider being part of a reality show.

  But . . .

  One of the cable stations made her the kind of offer that takes your breath away. Two million dollars for the first year, and depending on ratings, a big jump from there. The potential was forty to sixty million, which included money from product endorsements.

  I know she didn’t want to do it. The whole reality show thing seemed cheap and intrusive and a billion miles away from “real.” But . . . millions of dollars? That money would change everything. She would be set. She’d have the best of everything. College, a house. She could travel, which is something she always wanted to do but her family couldn’t afford. All of that would change if she said yes. The show would follow her life after I left. But the deal had a catch. Izzy had to get me to agree to a series of interviews before the launch date. The story, the producers insisted, was Izzy and Tristan. They said they needed me for context and validity and other crap. Izzy didn’t want to ask me, I know that. So yeah, I signed on and Tristan and Izzy became a real show.

  Tonight was the first of the interviews. Sigh. Just because you make the right choice doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it.

  Izzy said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all cool. We’ll be amazing. We’ll act like movie stars and the TV people will fall all over themselves.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Look at my life choices,” I said. “I’d have to be out of my mind.”

  That made her laugh so I kissed her. Nothing too crazy because Frick
and Frack were still there. A peck. She moved her head forward as I pulled back, wanting more. So did I. Her eyes said, Later. I grinned my answer.

  The whole school seemed to go quiet except for the low, muffled jumble of teacher voices behind closed doors.

  “Don’t you have a class now?” I asked.

  She gave me a sour look. “They gave me a note. I think they felt bad for me. So I’m allowed to take the rest of the afternoon off.”

  “Cool.”

  “They always let you take off early,” she said, and punched me lightly on the chest.

  “That’s because I’m a spaceman hero, champion of the people, and media superstar.” I gave her my best celebrity smile. The fake one I use for photo ops. All bright white teeth, lantern jaw, and deep-water tan. Herc says it makes me look like a used-car salesman, but what does he know?

  “Oh, please.” Izzy laughed. She grabbed my head in both hands and pulled me in for another quick kiss. “I’m hungry. Feed me.”

  “Steak and lobster at the best restaurant in town?”

  “No. Something greasy and fried. I need hot sauce and salt and gluten and dairy and saturated fats and lots of cholesterol.”

  “I’m not supposed to eat that sort of stuff, you know.”

  She gave me a wicked grin. “Do you care?”

  “No,” I said, “I pretty much don’t.”

  We ran laughing out of the building and into the parking lot, where a black SUV was parked.

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  So, okay . . . I guess I need to talk about the whole “Tristan and Isolde” thing. Let’s get a few things straight.

  First, everyone who interviewed us asked if we started going out together because of our names. That answer is no. Big honking no. I never even heard of the story of Tristan and Isolde until after we’d been going out for two years. I mean, it’s not like they teach twelfth-century French poetry in middle school. Did I know the story now? Sure. Everyone who knew it had told me one version or another. In the old poem, Tristan was a young knight from Cornwall, England, who fell in lust with Iseult (one of the spelling variations), who was an Irish princess. They drank a potion that made them fall madly in love, but they never really got to spend their lives together. And they died unhappy and heartbroken.