[Also wildly off topic] Platinum Moon by Bill White

Credit Issui Ogawa for this review: I was curious to see how this novel
of lunar development compared with The Next Continent. There have been
occasions when two authors working in isolation come up with similar
ideas; The Web Between the Worlds and Fountains of Paradise, for example,
have enough points of similarity that Clarke wrote an essay for the
Sheffield book explaining that sometimes these things happen [1]. This
is not the case with Platinum Moon and The Next Continent; the
similarities are mostly limited to the constraints imposed by current
realities and by the setting.

Hardness +4, Optimism +4, Whimsy 1

It's somewhere between 2013 and 2015 [2] and


while NASA has as much chance of landing a human on the Moon any time
soon as I have of becoming Lord High Chancellor of the Electoral College,
a private company, Lu Mat, is on the verge of a crewed landing. Lu Mat's
approach involves off-the-shelf technology applied in innovative ways
and in the exploitation of the Earth-Moon L1 point, which Lu Mat's
founder, Harold Hewitt, sees as the gateway to Lunar exploitation.

Hewitt's supposed killer ap for Lunar exploitation is lunar platinum,
touted as a necessary (or at least convenient) resource for the coming
post-Peak Oil/Let's Not Lose Bangladesh and Louisiana to Sea Level Rise
increased demand for batteries. His actual revenue stream seems far
more dependent on ancillary activities that PT Barnum would have
understood; his people hawk everything from clothing to collectible
coins, and happily take advantage of national pride both positive
(India is very happy that one of their own is on their way to the Moon)
and negative (The prospect of having an impotent NASA sitting on the
side-lines while a company based in Singapore lands on the Moon is very
pleasing to some and when I say "some" I mean "the French").

Unlike many books of this nature the lander already is on its way to
the Moon when the book opens. The drama comes not from the process of
building a coalition and overcoming various technical challenges to
reach the Moon but rather what to do when the mission goes wrong; soon
after landing one of the two O2 tanks on the lander vents itself,
leaving the lander with enough fuel to return to EML1 but without
enough oxidizer to actually burn it. Rather frustratingly for the
astronauts, the amount of O2 they have is almost enough; they could get
into low Lunar orbit if they wanted to, implying the delta vee short-
fall is only about 640 meters a second [3], a fraction of their total
delta vee budget; the shortfall is enough to threaten the mission with
a catastrophic failure and death all round for the astronauts.

While Lu Mat struggles with the technical challenge of rescuing its
astronauts, there's a political struggle going on in the USA. Many
Americans, including lead astronaut Ander's career obsessed ex-wife
Barbara and Senators Walthorpe and Angstrom see Lu Mat's existence as
an affront to America; Angstrom is very fond of tossing "traitor"
around as an epithet, even though as an elected official he should be
aware of the extremely narrow definition the US uses for that word [4].
Lu Mat's set back doesn't displease either Senator (although Barbara
doesn't want her ex to die) but just in case Lu Mat weathers the crisis,
they are working on legislation to punish people, Americans and otherwise,
who do business with Lu Mat.

* * *

One aspect this book has in common with the Ogawa is that in neither
case is it clear to me that the public business model used will in fact
yield profits from the supposed primary purpose of Lu Mat (Profit from
all the secondary activities seems well in hand). There's a strong whiff
of Poyais off Lu Mat's activities and for good reason; Hewitt has a
secret agenda we learn about at the end of the book and the resource
he's really after isn't really the platinum. That said, better Poyais
than Darien.

People looking for a one thing after another plot along the lines of A
Fall of Moondust will be a bit disappointed; aside from some duff
software and an unexpected problem with a crane, the astronauts and Lu
Mat do understand the situation, its challenges and the resources they
have to work with; it's just not clear which combination of resources
and techniques will yield the best solution. I suspect a AFOM-style plot
would have seriously undermined the idea that this is all only just out
of our grasp today, and so would be counter-productive. I also suspect
the model or at least a model the author had in mind was Apollo 13.

This is a self-published novel, one that you can buy he

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9415

I think it's White's first novel. It wouldn't have been out of place in a
professional publisher's SF line (well, except it's inappropriately
optimistic for American (Tea Bagger or Folk Song Army)-written near-
future SF). I didn't enjoy it as much as the Ogawa but I really liked
the Ogawa; I'd certainly read a second book by this author.

1: Poor Charles Sheffield seemed to get stung by this more often than
most; he also decided to write a story about two worlds orbiting so
close they were within each other's Roche lobes at the same time as
Robert Forward and IIRC only discovered the coincidence in casual
conversation with Forward.

2: They keep saying it's more than 40 years since the last man landed on
the Moon. This suggests that it is either 41 or 42, possibly 43 years
since December 14, 1972. If it was 45 years, they'd say so and if it
was 44 years, they'd say "nearly 45 years".

3: I think.

4: Has anyone ever been found guilty of treason in the US?


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