engleză
SpaceX is recruiting a hundred civilians to found the first permanent colony on Mars. One way. No return.
Out of three million applications filed worldwide, the algorithm selects David. He is not an astronaut, nor a researcher, nor an engineer. He is fifty years old, lives alone in a hamlet in rural France, and has never understood why his name came up.
At Hawthorne, on SpaceX's California training campus, he discovers the engineers' full arsenal of inventions and catches the eye of Stella, an American nurse. The rules forbid any relationship between recruits. A panoptic system, governed by the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world, records and studies every gesture, every distance, every lingering glance. And yet they will love each other in secret for eleven months.
And on August 17th at 7:17 in the morning, aboard the Endurance-one of six Starships launched toward the Martian plain of Arcadia Planitia-there will be fifteen of them on board.
Not quite fifteen.
Almost everything you will read in these pages already exists, or is currently in development in the laboratories of NASA, SpaceX, and the world's leading space agencies. This book does not imagine a distant future: it tells of what our generation will witness in its lifetime.
Book 1 of a four-part series.
