376:. But things take a dark turn as funding and support for resupply and Earth-return retrieval are cut by Maclachlan's administration (proposed and carried out by the very same men that tried to shoot the shuttle down), leaving the team with no hope for survival beyond what they may find on Titan. Once they reach Saturn and prepare to land on Titan's surface, another crew member is lost during the landing procedure with another effectively crippled. Titan is discovered to be a bleak, freezing dwarf-planet containing liquid
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Amid this negative climate and seeing no future for themselves after the permanent shutdown of the space program or for the decadent future of humanity, a small team of scientists and astronauts consisting of Paula
Bencerraf, a survivor of the Columbia disaster, Isaac Rosenberg, a JPL scientist,
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The depiction of Titan's surface is speculation based on respectable scientific data that was available in 1997 – in fact the book "Lifting Titan's Veil" notes that Baxter's story paraphrases closely sections of papers by Lorenz on raindrops on Titan and the geomorphology of crater lakes. The
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has no public or political support to help recover from the accident. Consequently, under the militaristic
Maclachlan's executive plans, the US military merges with the space agency for its resources to be diverted into defence spending, including using its space-faring vehicles as
399:(2002OA) in a suicide attack, with the aim of deflecting it into Earth orbit and threatening the world with targeted precision strikes in the future. Unfortunately, their calculations are wrong as they didn't take into account the size of the asteroid which could cause a
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The novel's final sequence depicts the final two crew members returned to life through some unspecified alien process on Titan where they died, several billion years in the future. The Sun has entered its
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phase, warming the
Saturnian system and aiding the evolution of life, in the form of strange, intelligent beetle-like creatures, on Titan. The astronauts watch as the creatures build a fleet of slow
251:
policies, the United States have severed ties with the rest of the world (including within themselves with seceding nation-states), especially while tensions grow with the emerging power of
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in high school curricula, all the while youth culture goes into a rebellious downward spiral with the widespread adoption of digital entertainment technology. Due to its far-right
395:
Meanwhile, the
Chinese, to retaliate for biological attacks by the US, send an astronaut (incidentally the first Chinese to go into space) to cause a huge explosion next to an
372:
for life support provides a continuous food supply, and the astronauts rely on vegetables, grain and fruit from the greenhouse as they travel on, and recycle waste via
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Siohban Libet and Nicola Mott, two
International Space Station astronauts and lovers, and Bill Angel, an astronaut, must persuade NASA to fund a crewed mission to
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The novel explores a range of possible attitudes toward space exploration and science in the early twenty-first century in which he lays down his concerns about
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general driven by shallow militarism and hatred for space exploration tries to shoot down the shuttle during lift off. Despite damage sustained from an
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falling like snow from the clouds; and the only traces of life they find are fossilised remains of microbic bacteria similar to those recovered from
406:
As the surviving astronauts slowly die of disease and in-fighting, they decide to try to ensure life will continue to survive: they take a flask of
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269:. In this timeline, instead of disintegrating on re-entry the shuttle makes an irreparable crash landing with the loss of two of the crew), and
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403:. The asteroid strikes Earth, critically damaging the planetary ecosystem. The Titan team members are presumably the last humans left alive.
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and to rejuvenate interest in space exploration to the world. They do so by recycling older spacecraft for several purposes: space shuttle
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re-entry capsules are adapted to become Titan landers. On the day of the last launch to begin the mission, with the shuttle
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probe's study of Titan, which began in 2005, has recently borne out that there do appear to be liquid lakes on the moon.
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successfully makes it into orbit, and the five crew members begin their six-year journey to Saturn by using a chain of
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named Xavier
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R. D. Lorenz and J. M. Mitton, Lifting Titan's Veil, Cambridge
University Press, 2002
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before the expanding Sun boils off the surface of the moon.
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was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1998.
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259:comes crashing down with the loss of
493:"1998 Award Winners & Nominees"
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192:novel by British writer
1181:The Massacre of Mankind
1146:The Light of Other Days
304:refitted to carry cargo
1206:The Hunters of Pangaea
346:fired from a restored
344:anti-satellite missile
1191:Unrelated collections
1174:The Medusa Chronicles
581:at Worlds Without End
472:Return from the Stars
322:TOPAZ nuclear reactor
220:and the loss of the
218:anti-intellectualism
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716:Destiny's Children
497:Worlds Without End
420:Interstellar probe
390:Martian meteorites
316:using the Shuttle
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709:Xeelee: Endurance
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558:. Retrieved
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101:18 July 1997
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1030:Iron Winter
789:Phase Space
744:Resplendent
318:OMS engines
53:Chris Moore
1222:Categories
846:Time's Eye
810:Silverhair
723:Coalescent
560:30 January
556:. BBC News
537:30 January
479:References
370:greenhouse
222:pioneering
188:is a 1997
1153:Evolution
1006:Northland
979:Flood/Ark
925:Navigator
918:Conqueror
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968:Moonseed
889:Webcrash
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531:BBC News
502:3 August
449:See also
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397:asteroid
308:Saturn V
299:Atlantis
262:Columbia
174:Moonseed
150:37950953
59:Language
1100:Proxima
1091:Proxima
1008:trilogy
911:Emperor
872:The Web
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360:Cassini
293:Cassini
280:Chinese
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253:China
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122:Pages
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639:Raft
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504:2009
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