Mars Lottery: MarsX, #1

By Michael Vetter

Mars Lottery is a near-future Christian allegory about taking the message of the Gospel where no human has gone before. Jesus proclaimed what is known as the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 and later in Acts 1:8 at a time when nobody dreamed that the Gospel could go farther than "…the uttermost part of the earth." However, God's Word is not restrained by terrestrial geography. God reaches out with the light of the Gospel to every living human in need of a Savior, whether they be on the Earth, Moon, Mars, or on a spaceship far from Earth.

 

This is a fictional story about Josh Aikin whom God calls to share the Gospel. He struggles with many unusual, controversial, inconvenient, risky, and even dangerous opportunities to evangelize. Like all believers, however, he must face situations in his path and decide to obey God or do nothing and stay safely with his friends, home, community, and church. His circumstances are extreme, but his choices are not much different from those that you and I face each day. Are we willing to be used by God, wherever He leads us?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Vetter
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201680244

Michael Vetter

Michael Vetter is a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer with degrees in Mechanical Engineering from UMass Lowell and Ocean Engineering from MIT. The Tapez Scroll—Remnant Rescue Series | Book 1 is his fifth book of fictional adventure that melds speculative technologies with Biblical themes. Michael and his wife Mary live in Salem, New Hampshire. Contact him at [e-mail]

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Mars Lottery

A MarsX Novel

Michael Vetter

Also by Michael Vetter

Bible Adventures

Run Before the Rain—An Antediluvian Adventure

One World Tower—A Babylonian Adventure

Flight from Egypt—Adventures Along the Nile

Sons of Zadok—Adventures of the Guardians

Remnant Rescue Series

The Tapez Scroll | Book 1

Sicarii Justice | Book 2

Gideon’s Sword | Book 3

Zion’s Deliverance | Book 4

Cohort Chronicles

The Quiet Centurion | Book I

Mars Lottery

A MarsX Novel

Mars Lottery

Copyright © 2021 by Michael Vetter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Certain characters in this book are historical figures and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance between characters in this book and actual persons is entirely fictitious or coincidental.

NKJV: Scripture is from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Formatting by Rik: Wild Seas Formatting

Cover design: Brian Weaver

Cover stock photo: Sergey Khakimullin

Foreword

And [Jesus] said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.’ Mark 16:15 (NKJV)

This book is not a science fiction novel about Mars. It is a modern-day allegory about taking the message of the gospel farther than any human has gone before. Jesus proclaimed what is known as the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 and later in Acts 1:8 at a time when nobody dreamed that the gospel could go farther than …the uttermost part of the earth. We must accept that God’s Word is not bound or restrained by our terrestrial geography. God reaches out with the light of the gospel to every living human in need of a Savior, whether they be on the Moon, on Mars, or on a spaceship somewhere far from Earth.

Most Christians in the 21st century shy away from going to Bangladesh, Burma, Romania, Morocco, or Sudan to tell others about Jesus Christ. It’s too frightening, dangerous, difficult, and most of all, it requires sacrifice. God calls a few to leave family, friends, job, and country to serve Him in strange lands. It’s been that way since the first century and God still calls missionaries to faraway places where Christ is not known. Sadly, many Christians today would rather go somewhere comfortable.

This is a fictional story about a man whom God calls to take the gospel to Mars. In his case, it’s more about the journey than the destination. He struggles with a unique, controversial, inconvenient, and dangerous opportunity to evangelize. Like all believers, he must choose among the options that God places in his path or do nothing and safely remain with friends, home, community, and church. This man’s circumstances may feel extreme, but his choices are not that much different from those you and I face. Will we follow God’s leading, wherever it takes us, or will we ignore Him and chart our own course?

"And so I have made it my aim to preach the gospel,

not where Christ was named,

lest I should build on another man’s foundation,

but as it is written [by Isaiah]:

‘To whom He was not announced, they shall see;

And those who have not heard shall understand.’"

Romans 15:20-21 (NKJV)

"…I heard the voice of the LORD, saying:

‘Whom shall I send, And who will go for Us?’

Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’"

Isaiah 6:8 (NKJV)

"So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth;

It shall not return to Me void,

But it shall accomplish what I please,

And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it."

Isaiah 55:11 (NKJV)

List of Major Characters

(In order of mention)

Joshua Josh Aikin – Lottery winner #12; retired civil servant; first civilian astronaut

Brian – Derry, NH Police Chief

George and Marta Perez – Josh’s next door neighbors

Nevil Blankenship – Deputy NASA Administrator

Elizabeth Liz Thompson – WMUR television news reporter

Dontrell Williams – Church pastor

Rick Fortuna – Deputy U.S. Marshal

Klaus Ritterberg – Director, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

Sonya Sarkisian – Lottery winner #66; second civilian astronaut

Ayanna Jones – Lottery winner #199; first alternate civilian astronaut

Duane Anderson – Lottery winner #235; second alternate civilian astronaut

Vernon Vern Bagwell – Lottery winner #390; third alternate civilian astronaut

Jaisól Rodriguez – Lottery winner #417; fourth alternate civilian astronaut

Carlos Ruiz-Guzmán – Colonel, U.S. Space Force; MarsX U.S. crew commander

Wendy Voss – U.S. astronaut on MarsX; nuclear engineer for nuclear and ion propulsion

Grace Musavi – Professor of interplanetary geology; researcher at Tycho Moonbase

Susan Whitson – U.S. astronaut on MarsX; civil engineer for Mars habitation construction

Jim Watkins – Colonel, U.S. Space Force; military commander at Tycho Moonbase

Michael Mike Safford – Colonel, U.S. Army; chief of security on Orion Station

Jessica Lynch – Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army; security assistant on Orion Station

Minato Tokugawa – Captain, Japanese Navy; Japan’s astronaut for MarsX

Logan Jensen – Graduate student at Tycho Moonbase

Himari Oda – Alternate Japanese astronaut for MarsX

1

MarsX

The United Nations Mars Exploration and Migration Consortium is a grandiose name, maybe even pretentious, but the international project has drawn nations together who would otherwise be at each other’s throats. Most people call it MarsX for short and as a not-so-subtle nod to a certain billionaire visionary. The fact that he and his family are picking up a large part of the tab to send people to the Red Planet may be a factor too. With a budget equivalent to three trillion U.S. dollars (and ever-increasing), eleven countries pooled their resources to send twenty representatives to Mars. The eagerness to build an interplanetary colony was accelerated by changes in the Earth’s atmosphere that terrified the planet’s inhabitants, most of all the elite, who worried that their way of life might be in peril until the planet pulled itself back into equilibrium. Nobody expects that to happen anytime soon. After all, what good is a Palm Beach condo if the Atlantic Ocean is lapping at your window or a slope-side ski lodge in Aspen where it hasn’t snowed in the Rockies for years? The solution, and the reason for urgency in spite of an astronomical price tag, is to quickly vacate the neighborhood, proving that you can do almost anything if you have enough money.

The super-wealthy have their faults, but one of them in this case was not hypocrisy. Since the NASA budget for Mars exploration was cancelled more than a decade ago, private investors doggedly pursued space migration with their own resources. American scions of technology with family names like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerburg, Turgenev, Ellison, Yang, Bloomberg, and Scott, pooled their wealth to develop the technology needed to fly to Mars. It wasn’t altruistic. The super-wealthy were more than happy to send twenty other people to Mars first to make sure it was safe. While there, they’d construct a base camp with first-class accommodations. That was fair enough. Their children or grandchildren would go on the second or third flights to populate the Martian base, just like the second and third shiploads of settlers to the New World in the 17th century. The leaders of America’s technological aristocracy were not entirely selfless either. They had their eyes on valuable mining rights on Mars much as they had exploited resources on the Moon.

Survival of the human species and mining for rare-earth metals weren’t the only reasons to go to Mars. Both objectives held appeal to pragmatic industrialists with a view toward self-enrichment and self-perpetuation. American farmers, mechanics, school teachers, and office workers had the same profound questions as everyone else: Where did life come from? Is there evidence of life on other planets? Are we alone in the Universe?

Billions of human beings were so fascinated with the search for extraterrestrial life that it became like a religion. Whether a woman tilling her garden in India, an Argentinian gaucho herding his cattle, an accountant in Iowa, or a fruit vendor on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, they and billions like them longed for answers in life beyond themselves. Their questions were more personal: Is there a purpose for my life? Where did I come from? Why am I here? What will happen to my children in the future? What will happen to me when I die? Does anyone care? Scientists and futuristic philosophers, the high priests of space travel, proclaimed that Mars held answers to mankind’s most profound questions. More than a century ago, scientists had speculated that evidence of life, even if dead for millions of years, might be found on the Moon. Scores of manned and robotic probes turned up no such evidence.

Today, almost two hundred Chinese live on the Moon in mining camps that are effectively prisons in a cold, colorless, airless wasteland. People have always assumed that Mars, the Red Planet, would be different. In spite of numerous robots that roved, drilled, and sniffed the Martian surface, data revealed no evidence of past life. Frozen carbon dioxide regions at Mars’ poles harbored a more hostile environment than the middle regions of the planet. Still, scientists hoped that traces of oxygen and water might have once supported life. It was visually evident that rivers of liquid once flowed on the surface, so astronomers speculated that canals must have been built by an intelligent civilization, now long-extinct. Certainly, scientist thought, evolution must have found a way to blossom in a Martian lake or seabed eons ago. This speculation offered a sliver of hope for people who trusted science to answer mankind’s oldest questions. If there was proof of past life on Mars then that should prove that spontaneous evolution of life also happened on Earth! If life once existed on Mars long ago, even if only microscopic cell-like creatures, that would prove that the human species was not alone in the universe! MarsX promised to be mankind’s last hope in a corrupt, dying world.

2

The Lottery

Eleven nation-states formed the United Nations Mars Exploration and Migration Consortium to start a base colony on the Red Planet, search for evidence of life, begin mining rare-earth metals, and set the stage for large-scale space migration from Earth to Mars.

Unmanned ships have already set up automated stations near the planet’s northern pole to extract water from frozen, sub-Martian rock containing less than one percent moisture. Robotic machines have been in operation for two years filling tanks with drinking water and separating hydrogen and oxygen from water molecules to fuel the return flights. Another automated factory has been busy extracting oxygen from Mars’ thin atmosphere. The first explorers will build living quarters underground so that the next waves of immigrants will be protected from deadly cosmic and solar radiation. After three or four years on the surface, the first explorers will return to Earth and the Isaac Asimov spaceship will carry hundreds of immigrants to their new home. The first explorers may be away from Earth for five to six years depending on the relative positions of Earth and Mars in their orbits when they depart.

***

The President of the United States was re-elected by twenty percent of the population for her third term. The fifteen-member Supreme Court justified this and other changes by declaring the original Constitution racist and hopelessly archaic. The judges’ responsibility, as they saw it, was to rewrite the nation’s guiding principles for a new century with its eyes on space colonization. As a result, the Supreme Executive finally had control of the three pillars of government of the United States to do as she wished.

As head of her Progressive Party, the President promised in her re-election campaign that the United States fully supported the MarsX mission and purpose. It was her idea, after her election, that the mission must be funded with private donations. Public excitement about going to Mars was so high that private funds from wealthy and ordinary citizens alike poured in. With the funds available, Congress moved the funds to a newly established National Air and Space Agency (NASA).

Congress added unusual wording in a Mars Exploration and Migration Act to sponsor a national lottery that would select citizen-members of the first U.S. Mars crew. The Mars Lottery would randomly choose two primary candidates and four backups, or alternates, to represent the U.S. while NASA would chose two career astronauts and two alternates for its professional crew.

The Mars Lottery used the motto, "Fairness–Transparency–Equity." The lottery promised a randomized selection of candidates from all adults registered by the latest Census.

Movie stars, sports figures, politicians, industrial tycoons, Wall Street hedge fund billionaires, and social media influences were up in arms. They demanded preferential treatment instead of a random selection from the general population. The President, having made promises about fairness a cornerstone of her campaign, assured the public that each person would have an equal chance to take part in the historic event.

America’s best mathematicians conceived a perfect algorithm to select six people at random from a pool of 410 million candidates, all over the age of majority (sixteen), listed in the latest Census database of the fifty-two states and overseas territories. A committee from the National Academy of Sciences certified that the algorithm produced purely random results.

3

Lottery Day

Michigan, Ann Arbor—University of Michigan Football Stadium

Work in America came to a stop on August 21st. Mars Lottery Day was a national holiday. It assumed a carnival-like atmosphere like Mardi Gras, SXSW, Burning Man, and New Year’s Eve rolled into one. After months of building excitement, the parking lot of Michigan’s Big House stadium hosted a tailgate party unlike any in history. Streets for twenty miles around Ann Arbor became pedestrian walkways when traffic came to a standstill. Attendance inside the stadium exceeded any bowl game in the city’s history and the world watched the spectacle on live streams projected onto massive screens and on billions of phones. Only in the United States would politicians have left the selection of half its Mars crew to a computerized random lottery and hosted the drawing in a football stadium packed to overflowing with 110,000 cheering spectators. How typically American, observe international members of the MarsX consortium.

Social media platforms, satellite news channels, blogs, and government media from around the world broadcasted the lottery as one by one the algorithm results were displayed on a four-acre scoreboard. Organizers made the selection a global media event with sponsors and advertisements. A computer selected the first one hundred names in less than one second, but the event organizers drew out the suspense by displaying each selectee’s name on the stadium scoreboard every two minutes. Fireworks burst overhead and a billion people searched the name of each selectee and shared photographs and personal information with billions of their friends. The organizers figured that out of the first one hundred names, only a few would be willing to make the dangerous five-year trip. Even if those agreed to go, they still might not pass NASA’s physical. If all went well, the selection could go on for days until six candidates accepted and received NASA’s approval.

The world soon knew that #1 was a thirty-year-old black mother from the Bronx, NY with five children. When contacted by phone, she thought it was a telemarketing scam. She’d been caring for a sick child and didn’t realize that the Lottery was that day. When informed that she was chosen to go to Mars, she laughed and slammed down the phone.

Other selectees proved to be a random cross-section of America’s population. One was a death row convict executed a month earlier. When told that she’d won the lottery, an elderly nursing home resident asked how much money she’d won. Others expressed no interest in going to Mars or leaving their families or jobs for five years. The algorithm also revealed embarrassing shortcomings in the Census’ data. Nonetheless, the President and NASA were committed to vetting each of the first one hundred selectees and giving them a chance to represent their country on a voyage to another planet.

***

Joshua Aikin is a sixty-year-old retiree from the Manchester, New Hampshire Water Works. He is vaguely aware that the MarsX Lottery is that day. The thought of what he’d do if his name came up had never crossed his mind. After all, he calculated, his chance was one in 410 million. Even if his