Each person’s marriage is very different than everybody else’s. After having been married for more than 32 years and observing many other married couples during my lifespan, that fact remains evident. So, trying to “judge” who is doing it “right” or “better” or “wrong” is a total waste of time.
Every couple merges their lives in completely different ways with vastly dissimilar expectations as each union is balanced by God. Thus, as I relate the following marriage experience, let me be clear: while Claudia and I consider our relationship the “norm,” most other marriage couples probably would not agree that ours is anywhere near “normal”. Yet, I am convinced that our marriage is as perfect as two humans can experience – but only because Jesus uniquely matched us up in a one-of-a-kind arrangement for His reason of advancing the Kingdom of God. If we were married to any other two people, it might not work very well at all!
And so it was that Claudia and I teamed up on many aquanaut missions together, eventually logging more time living and working together as a married couple on the ocean floor than anyone on the planet. Claudia even homeschooled several of our children during times on the seafloor, and we watched two of our sons certified in open water SCUBA diving out the front windows from an undersea habitat I designed and operated for NASA – the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station. The reason I bring all this up is that at some point Claudia agreed to accept the role of living this bizarre life alongside me and including our children in this lifestyle at the same time.
Several years after this burst of undersea activity ended, I came home from my office at the Kennedy Space Center with yet another expedition request for Claudia. I walked into our living room and asked her to listen to an idea that I had developed to share with her. My request was probably about as extraordinary a test of marital commitment that has perhaps ever been asked of any wife. I laid it all out in a breathless “I-can’t-believe-I’m-even-asking-this” explosion of words befitting a high school kid lining up a weekend of spelunking:
“Claudia, how would you like to fly with me on a private spacecraft past Venus, out to Mars, then take another fly-by of Venus on the way home? It’ll take exactly 589 days!”
Claudia could tell by the expression on my face, the look in my eyes, and how I was speaking that I was not joking – she knew me that well. And she immediately and with a supernatural calmness replied, “Sure! Now sit down and tell me the rest of the story.”
Inspiration Mars
The first space tourist was Dennis Tito, a wealthy entrepreneur. On 28 April 2001, he flew to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Russian Soyuz TM-32 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and remained there for eight days.
Tito was so encouraged by his mission in low Earth orbit (LEO) that upon his return, he immediately began to imagine how he could plan and execute a mission out of LEO to Mars. It would be a fly-by with no landing, much like Apollo 8 flew by the moon in 1968 and returned to Earth without touching down on the Lunar surface.
Tito announced his plans for this interplanetary jaunt on 27 February 2013. He named his mission Inspiration Mars.
The first window of opportunity when the planets were aligned for his launch would be in 2018, less than five years away. Dennis Tito had first suggested that the flight crew would be himself and his wife. To Tito’s truly prescient thinking, you could not possibly assemble a crew more balanced than a stable married couple, since they had the advantage of decades of making it work under every conceivable circumstance.
Tito’s plan was to use the SpaceX Falcon Heavy for lifting a modified SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule outfitted with an inflatable compartment on the front to be used for more roomy accommodations. (see graphic) 2013 was still the early years for SpaceX, so when he suggested these space vehicles, the company’s ability to produce certified human-rated hardware was actually quite iffy.
As a matter of fact, the Falcon Heavy’s first test flight with its own Mars-bound payload would not fly until 2018, and the first crew-rated Crew Dragon would not fly until 2020. So, Tito missed his mission’s initial 2018 launch goal by a significant margin. Obviously, Dennis Tito was even more aspirational in his deep space planning than Elon Musk!
The launch window for the backup mission to the 2018 Inspiration Mars plan opened between 17 July and 15 August 2021. Plus, this endeavor was significantly expanded by suggesting a double Venus flyby. That meant going to Venus for a gravitational assist on the way out and, after the Mars fly-by, coming back again to Venus for a gravity assist course correction that would slow the crewed vehicle for its return to Earth.
The mission time to accomplish the new planetary route was also expanded from 501 days to 589 days – or 1.61 Earth years spent hopping around the inner solar system. And Dennis Tito announced he was searching for a two-person crew that he would personally select (I’m guessing that his wife Akiko finally drew the line at 589 days).
Tito was looking for a married couple with education and career credentials who had a solid space connection. It was very clear to me that since I was a career NASA Space Life Scientist with an Advanced Space Life Support Systems background, a NASA Aquanaut, and Mission Commander of 14 undersea space analog missions who was married to a former US Army Major Command and General Staff College graduate with specialties in security and logistics, and we also shared a verified world record for the longest amount of time spent together as a married couple on aquanaut missions from our years of NASA undersea missions, that we would probably place very high up in the competition for the crew. Indeed, I had convinced myself that Tito could not find a better or more experienced team for his Inspiration Mars mission.
Claudia patiently listened and then nodded, replying, “So, who’s going to watch Mr. Peabody and Snickers?” referring to our yellow lab and cat.
I just stared back at her like all other husbands who never stop to parse out the minutiae of life until it’s too late.
Claudia was entirely onboard and fully ready to reschedule life for the next half-decade so I excitedly submitted our application letter.
Tito was personally willing to contribute $100 million of the mission’s estimated $2 billion price tag. He was counting on $300 million from private contributions and the remaining expenses to be funded by NASA. But the Space Agency was quick to remind Dennis Tito that Inspiration Mars was his idea and not NASA’s.
The Agency did not have the budget to fund Tito’s brainchild because of other, more urgent Agency-centic projects. These included the troublesome rebirth of NASA’s revised Moon plans that were being scraped together after the cancellation of the Constellation program. Plus, NASA had Mars plans of their own which involved landing their crew on Mars’ surface.
The end of our part of this story is one of those “hurry-up-and-wait” scenarios while trying to discern what’s going on in the fog of the plans of billionaires, government agencies, and rocket companies. As it turned out, even billionaire Dennis Tito was looking for external funding for the ever-expanding mission footprint at the same time that he was looking for his perfect married couple crew.
As the months passed after our submission, by late 2015, the Inspiration Mars website suddenly disappeared from the internet, signaling the sudden, unexpected demise of the mission. Vanishing before our eyes was the great plan and (as I discovered later) the opportunity to die between planets in deep space! During those “early days” literally no one knew the hazards of extended exposure to toxic microgravity compounded by the synergy of fundamentally unshielded cosmic radiation. Riding about the cosmos in a balloon just sounds like fun.
So, there it was. Along with the disappearance of the website, our hopes for a long flight around the closest pair of planets were also lost in the silence of nothing happening.
And, immediately after I retired from NASA life got really busy.
Looking back on this, I am always reminded of one of the most important of my life’s takeaways from it all – one that remains indelibly etched in my heart and memory. The memory is centered on the day I came home, and my sweet wife said “yes!” without hesitation. She was willing to follow me not just to the ends of the Earth, but to the ends of the solar system itself. It was one extraordinarily special day in our marriage and in our life together that I will never forget.
It likewise this little adventure reminds me of the Templar who knew the score before each engagement on the battlefield. No one ever had to ask him if he was willing to go out and probably not come back. But he was always ready, dressed for battle and out on the field of honor and sacrifice. He was already ready to live out whatever the results of his standing orders that focused his heart and life’s map all the way – not just to Venus and Mars – but all the way out to the infinite, boundaryless extents of eternity. Going out on the field of honor was never up for discussion or decision. He was a Templar. And all the rest went without saying.
Is that measure of devotion the same in our modern Templar order? Is our call to duty always “yes” without equivocation, argument or second guessing? Is the Templar battlefield still the ground of honor all the way to infinity?
We shall eventually stand before Him, our Captain of the Lord’s Army at the end, as is repeated at the end of every Convent and Investiture. There we will face Him, the Christ of our salvation and of our renewal, the One who said “yes” to His own unthinkably difficult sacrifice, who willingly thus became the Great Sacrificial Sovereign of our own sanctification. And He will acknowledge our own faithfulness even as we often struggled against all odds.
And when we do stand before Him, he will look back at us, at His precious soldiers of the Cross, and will accept us into Glory as the ones who always said yes, and trusted Him to complete our long, often dark journeys in the expanse of our own time, wherever they happened to lead.
For He is, after all our Lord, our Captain, the Christ of All Creation, the only One to Whom we would follow anywhere, even off the surface of this planet or any other world that He has created by His own Word. Ever.
______________
“For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through Him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.” 2 Corinthians 1:20