Eagle Station

Prologue

For more than three and a half billion years after lava flows and fire fountains marked its birth, the Taurus-Littrow Valley, surrounded by gray hills and massifs, slumbered in airless silence. But over the course of seventy-five hectic hours, two men from Earth, Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, broke in on its age-old isolation. On foot and aboard a four-wheeled rover, they explored the mountain valley’s slopes, impact craters, and boulder fields, carrying out experiments and collecting more than two hundred and fifty pounds of priceless geological samples.

A remotely programmed television camera mounted aboard the abandoned rover vehicle showed their four-legged Lunar Module, Challenger, starkly outlined against the smooth, rounded peaks rising along the western edge of the Taurus-Littrow. For long minutes, radio channels to Earth and to the Command-and-Service Module, America, high overhead in orbit, were full of chatter as the two NASA astronauts ran through their final pre-liftoff checklists. Then, abruptly, it was time to go.

“Ten seconds.”

“Abort Stage pushed. Engine arm is Ascent.”

“Okay, I’m going to get the Pro… 99. Proceeded. 3… 2… 1—”

Bright blue, red, and green sparks cascaded away from the midsection of the spacecraft as four explosive bolts detonated, separating its upper ascent stage from the four-legged lower half. Almost simultaneously, its Bell Aerospace rocket engine lit in a flash of searing orange flame. “Ignition.”

Propelled by thirty-five hundred pounds of thrust, Challenger’s ascent stage leapt into the black, star-filled sky. For the next twenty-six seconds, the camera followed the small spacecraft as it climbed rapidly toward its planned orbital rendezvous and docking with America and its pilot, Ron Evans.

And with that, an era came to an end.

In the course of forty months, six separate Apollo missions had successfully landed a total of twelve American astronauts on the desolate surface of the moon. All twelve men returned safely home to Earth. A scattering of footprints, rover tracks, emplaced scientific instruments, and jettisoned gear remained — offering silent testimony to a time when humans had, however briefly, lived and worked on another world.

For more than half a century, there would be no manned presence on the lunar surface.

But that was about to change…