Damnit, we can still get some things right, Wilson thought proudly as the shining conglomeration of space hardware diminished into the eternal night. It would be another decade until the FESA could mount a Mars mission, by which time NASA planned on having a self-sustaining base on the icy sands of Arabia Terra. Hopefully, by then, the agency would also be flying asteroid-capture missions and even a Jovian expedition as well. I’m not too old to be a part of those, they’ll need experienced commanders.

His mind underwent just the tiniest tweak of envy at the prospect of what would come in the midterm future, events and miracles whose timetable and budget allocations meant they might just elude him. The Europeans can afford to wait, though. While thanks to the dominant influence of the Religious Right over the last few administrations, the U.S. had halted all genetic work centered around stem cells, the Federal government in Brussels had poured money into biogenic research, with spectacular results. Now that the early bugs had been ironed out of the hugely expensive procedure, they’d begun to rejuvenate people. The first man to receive the treatment, Jeff Baker, had died in a climax of global publicity; but in the following seven years there had been eighteen successes.

Space and Life. Those separate interests spoke volumes about the way the cultures of Earth’s two major Western power groups had diverged over the past three decades.

Now Wilson’s fellow Americans were beginning to reevaluate their attitude to genetic engineering. Already there were urban myths of Caribbean and Asian clinics offering the rejuvenation service to multibillionaires. And Federal Europe was once again attempting to narrow the American lead in space, desperate to prove to the world that it excelled in every field. Given the fractious political state currently afflicting the planet, Wilson rather welcomed the idea of the two blocs drawing closer together once more—that was, after Americans had landed on Mars.