Titan

NASA’s Cassini probe will reach Titan in 2004: Titan is the amazing story of a visionary’s response to the discovery of life on Saturn’s moon. Another BIG space novel from the acclaimed successor to Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein: the conquest of space as it could still happen.

Titan is the epic saga of one woman’s will to succeed and the triumph of a dream over bureaucracy and fear. Paula Benacerraf, grandmother and astronaut, is appointed to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle fleet after another Challenger-type disaster. Instead, she listens to the oddball JPL scientist Rosenberg, who is determined to explore the ammonia-based life Cassini discovers on Titan.

Using NASA’s rusting Saturn rockets, mothballed Apollos and remaining Shuttles, frail humans are hurled, in the face of violent opposition from the military, to the edge of the Solar System. To the edge, also, of sanity.