Oxygen (novel)
Encyclopedia
There is also a novel with the same title by Andrew Miller
.
Oxygen is a futuristic Christian novel
by John B. Olson and Randall S. Ingermanson
suffers damage from an in-space explosion, which severely limits the crew's oxygen supply, forcing them to make some hard, lifeboat-like choices to stay alive.
. In real life, this volcano has not erupted for many years—but in the novel, Mount Trident vents sulfur dioxide into the air, and this gas settles into the valley where Valkerie is encamped. She barely survives the experience, at one point taking the air from the tires of her Jeep, which is the only air available for her to breathe.
The next morning, the Chief Administrator of NASA
, together with one of NASA's senior physicians, lands on the slope of Mount Trident in a helicopter. They are looking for Valkerie, because they wish to interview her for a position as an Astronaut
Candidate. The conversation that follows is very confusing to both sides, chiefly because Valkerie is convinced that Mount Trident is about to erupt and all three must evacuate at once. Eventually, however, Valkerie climbs aboard the helicopter with the two NASA officials.
Eventually she is summoned to Houston, Texas, and reports for training at NASA's headquarters complex. A hot dispute between the NASA Administrator and Nate Harrington, the Mars Mission Director, results in her beginning a training regimen that is more grueling than usual, leading her to believe that Harrington wants her dropped from the program on any pretext he can invent. But in fact the NASA brass are very much impressed with her academic record and her seemingly unique ability to cope with "five-sigma" days—days remarkable for a series of dire, often life-threatening crises. (Her breathing the air in her Jeep tires to survive the fumarolic venting incident is a case in point.) As for Mr. Harrington, he has never wanted anything more than to have the NASA administrator respect his prerogatives as Mars Mission Director—and furthermore, he is distracted by a series of events that have nothing to do with Valkerie or her candidacy.
Nate's distractions include: a serious budget problem that has forced NASA to sell exclusive broadcast rights to a major television network, a clear threat from a prominent US Senator that he "has the votes" to terminate NASA's flagship program, a compromise of project security that darkly suggests a terrorist plot against NASA (and requires him to have an FBI agent as a semi-regular on the NASA campus)--and a controversy involving the crew selection for Ares 10, which is to be the first crewed mission to Mars. NASA's psychiatrists have abruptly demanded interviews with all members of the Ares 10 crew—Josh Bennett, Kennedy Hampton, Alexis "Lex" Ohta, and Bob "Kaggo" Kaganovski. Bob in particular fears that the psychiatrists want to remove him from the crew—because he has never felt entirely secure in his position, mainly because he does not have the devil-may-care abandon that is part of the "astronaut stereotype" and which Kennedy displays in overabundance. So when the psychiatrists call him in for an interview, he tells them that he would gladly obey any order given him by Josh, the assigned mission commander—not mentioning that he always reserves the right to act as he sees fit if he thinks that Josh, or any other commander, has issued a wrong order.
But the psychiatrists are not suspicious of Bob at all, but rather of Josh. Specifically, their protocols inform them that having one man, even the mission commander, dominate the crew is a recipe for disaster. Bob's interview, added to an earlier interview given by Kennedy, only add to their disquiet. During their deliberations, they then run a computer-based decision-analytic model on two possible crew complements—one including Josh, and the other removing Josh as mission commander and assigning Valkerie Jansen to the flight. To everyone's surprise, a crew complement that includes Valkerie scores very high on their decision-analytic indices.
Thus the psychiatrists issue their final "recommendation," which carries the force of an order: Josh Bennett is to be dropped from the crew, Kennedy Hampton is to be promoted to mission commander, and the crew will gain a new mission specialist: Valkerie Jansen.
Valkerie feels doubly guilty about accepting the assignment. First, she sees herself as usurping the place of another, more experienced astronaut (Josh). Second, she is afraid that a prior association will return to haunt her—specifically, her relationship with a fellow student at Yale
University who killed himself in a laboratory explosion he had caused because of his notion of Christian
duty. (This bombing incident took place during the heyday of Operation Rescue
--and furthermore, the presence of a religious-motivated picket line at NASA's main gate only adds to her apprehensions about having her Christian associations revealed.)
Josh is ignorant of her fears concerning her Christian associations, but recognizes that she might feel guilty over supplanting him. So he takes her on a training flight to the Kennedy Space Center
and there tells her that her primary duty is to Project Ares, which will shut down completely if she does not accept the assignment. He gallantly offers to take personal responsibility for her remaining training. With this assurance, she returns to Houston and tells Nate Harrington that she will accept the assignment.
Three months later, they have (finally!) repaired their data telemetry bus, and Kennedy and Bob perform an EVA to repair the Ku-band antenna, a repair that would have been pointless before. After completing the repair, they proceed to inspect the dual solar panels to see whether they can repair the damaged panel. Bob discovers some stray exposed wires that do not appear on anyone's schematics of the habitat. He proceeds to test them with a multimeter
--and by a fateful error, sets the multimeter to measure resistance rather than electromotive potential ("voltage"). As a result, he inadvertently bridges a circuit between the wires—and thus causes an explosion. Someone has, quite simply, planted a bomb on board, and Bob has triggered it.
The explosion blows away the otherwise intact solar panel, compromises the hull, and dazes Bob and fills his arm with what turns out to be stainless-steel shrapnel—a detail whose full significance the astronauts will realize only much later. Valkerie, standing by in the EVA suit room, immediately (a) suits up, (b) places the unconscious Lex Ohta into a rescue bubble, (c) hastily repairs the hull breach, and (d) releases the remaining oxygen from the fuel-cell tanks. Only then can she open the airlock to admit Kennedy, who at first insists that Bob is dead. Valkerie, believing that Kennedy acted carelessly, goes outside to fetch him in.
Presently Bob recovers enough to discover that Valkerie's repair was incomplete, and simply asks her to help him make a more complete repair. But as a result of the original hull breach and Valkerie's incomplete repair efforts, the crew no longer has enough oxygen on board to survive the transit to Mars. Neither will they have sufficient power for all ship's systems from the remaining solar panel when they reach Mars. When NASA—represented by a very shaken Josh Bennett as CapCom—fails to inform them of this fact in a timely fashion, the astronauts bleakly conclude that they can no longer trust NASA.
That question is more than academic—because a review of surveillance tapes made inside the habitat prior to launch identifies six people only who could have planted the bomb—the four members of the crew, Josh Bennett, and Nate Harrington. No one suspects Nate or Josh (not yet), and so the astronauts suspect one another—and furthermore, Kennedy is deliberately manipulating his crewmates' emotions, even to the point of crudely demanding sexual favors from Valkerie (which she refuses to grant).
Two further items of evidence eventually decide the issue in Valkerie's favor. One, Josh Bennett discovers that Kennedy in fact manipulated NASA's psychiatric brass in order to have Josh removed from the crew. Two, a computer simulation predicts that if Bob is the one to stay awake, he'll only use up all the oxygen.
Bob, ever reserving his right to act at discretion, secretly prepares a dose of sodium pentathol to use on Valkerie after she has sedated Kennedy. But at the last minute, Valkerie tells him that she forgives him for not trusting her. He cannot bring himself to rebel against Valkerie, and so allows her to sedate him.
As the ERV continues its approach, Valkerie asks for and receives permission to revive Bob so that he can help her pilot the habitat to a rendezvous with the ERV. Unhappily, the ERV is approaching far too fast. Valkerie's attempt to match velocity with it ends in failure, and worse—she uses up more fuel than they can spare.
With the ERV speeding past the habitat, Bob and Valkerie suddenly remember that the ERV carries a crew re-entry vehicle with its own engine. They issue orders to detach it from the ERV and bring it to a slow rendezvous—and then Valkerie makes another spacewalk to cut loose its oxygen tank and bring it aboard. Bob, in turn, receives instructions to build a Sabatier scrubber—an ultra-low-power device for removing carbon dioxide from the ship's air.
They then reawaken Kennedy, who must regain his strength to perform the landing—and then decide that the only way they can land is to abandon the original mission profile calling for a Martian orbital capture, and instead dive straight down to the Martian surface. This is an incredibly risky maneuver, one which they almost do not complete because they are about to use an aerobrake deployment system that is non-functional. (Another failure of trust is responsible for this predicament, which they avoid only by some last-minute deduction of NASA's true intentions.) They intend to land in a camp that previous missions have already established—but they end up landing too far away. However, they manage to pool their remaining oxygen to give to Bob and Kennedy, so that they can retrieve a pressurized powered rover to rescue Valkerie and Lex. When the men return, they find the women unconscious and seemingly dead—but Valkerie has found Bob's hidden dose of sodium pentathol and uses that to put her and Lex into a coma once again—so that they survive, but Valkerie suffers multiple rib fractures when Bob attempts cardiopulmonary resuscitation
.
Finally, the astronauts realize the significance of the stainless-steel shrapnel with which Bob had been wounded in the initial explosion. None of the ship's systems was made of stainless steel—in fact, the lack of any material but plastic was a source of great frustration to Valkerie when she first attempted to seal the hull breach. Valkerie and Lex realize that the stainless steel must have come from a bacterial culture vial that Josh Bennett had received from a former girlfriend in Antarctica—and that the vial contained a radiation-resistant bacterium, the same one that in fact had contaminated some of the ship's systems after the explosion. Now the astronauts realize what has happened to them: Josh Bennett, fearing cancellation of Project Ares and the disbanding of NASA, sought to "seed" a radio-resistant bacterium on Mars for the astronauts to "discover." To accomplish this, he did plant a bomb on board, designed to detonate with the deployment of the aerobrakes. But the damage to the habitat on the rocky launch ultimately caused the bomb to detonate in transit. This also explains Josh's brittle emotional state—he realizes that his attempt to give the astronauts something to discover very nearly killed them instead. Bob ultimately tells Josh that Valkerie has figured it out, and that they all forgive him for what he did, knowing as they do that he never meant them any harm.
The last scene is a set-up for the sequel: Bob, who is now enamored of Valkerie, proposes marriage to her before a worldwide six-billion-strong television audience that has tuned into watch "the first two astronauts to walk on Mars."
, and more specifically to which characters in that 1960's television series are most analogous to various positions on a Mars crew.
The narrative also contains an allusion to The Right Stuff
, by describing Astronaut Kennedy Hampton as being an astronaut in the "fighter jock" mold—addicted to flying as a physical sport, given to moderately heavy social drinking, sometimes given to driving while intoxicated, and accepting questionable attentions from female hangers-on, also known as groupie
s. (Note: this novel is devoid of any sexual content beyond Astronaut Hampton crudely soliciting a sexual bribe from Astronaut Jansen, who indignantly refuses.)
mission.
The Mars Habitat Unit, the Earth Return Vehicle, the Ares Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle
, and various other pieces of equipment are all products of the active research program of Mars Society
under the directorship of Doctor Robert Zubrin
. The mission profile is an adaptation of NASA's own Mars Design Reference Mission profile, which itself derives from the Mars Society's own Mars Semi-Direct Mission profile.
The following real-life institutions and events bear direct reference in Oxygen: the United States Senate
, NBC
, and the National Football League
(and its premier event, the Super Bowl
). Specifically:
(The Right Stuff
) has definitively revealed that the Mercury astronauts were not unblemished heroes (with the possible exception of John Glenn
), the notion of an astronaut deliberately manipulating his administrative superiors to influence a flight assignment, and another astronaut resorting to planting a "discoverable scientific find" in order to ensure continuance of his country's space program, might have proved difficult for readers to accept.
The jarring portrait of NASA's finest might serve as one possible explanation for the lack of continued interest in this title. However, Christian critics have consistently praised the work, perhaps because it unabashedly demonstrates that no human beings deserve placement on any sort of pedestal, and that all human beings are quite capable of making mistakes, often disastrous ones, even with the best of intentions.
By far, however, the greatest significance of works like this is that they seek to bridge the gap between faith on one side, and pure and applied science on the other. Oxygen forthrightly addresses certain areas of science that might appear to test the Christian faith quite sorely—among them the very possibility of finding living organisms on a world other than earth. Regrettably, Oxygen does not offer any explanation that might reconcile the disparate concepts of life on worlds beyond earth, and God having created life on earth and only on earth. One possible explanation might be that Mars harbors living organisms carried to it in the event that caused the Noachic Flood
. (See especially the article on Hydroplates.) But neither this novel nor its sequel discuss that possibility at all—possibly because the theory remains controversial. Instead, they offer an assurance that the Christian faith is strong enough to stand any test, including a scientific finding that might on the surface appear to contradict Scripture. (In fact, Scripture is silent on the nature of the planets, and indeed on all celestial bodies, except the sun, moon, and stars.)
for the best futuristic Christian novel
in its year of release.
, in which most of the above-listed characters reappear.
Andrew Miller (writer)
Andrew Miller is a British journalist and author.Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton.He worked as a television producer before joining The Economist to write about British politics and culture. In 2004 he was appointed the Economist's Moscow correspondent, and covered, among other...
.
Oxygen is a futuristic Christian novel
Christian novel
A Christian novel is any novel that expounds and illustrates a Christian world view in its plot, its characters, or both, or which deals with Christian themes in a positive way.-The tradition of Christian fiction:...
by John B. Olson and Randall S. Ingermanson
Plot introduction
The first crewed ship to fly to MarsMars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
suffers damage from an in-space explosion, which severely limits the crew's oxygen supply, forcing them to make some hard, lifeboat-like choices to stay alive.
Explanation of the novel's title
Oxygen is a vital element for life—and one that the accident to the characters places in perilously short supply.Beginning
As the novel begins, Dr. Valerie ("Valkerie") Jansen is on a field trip on the slope of Mount Trident on the Alaska PeninsulaAlaska Peninsula
The Alaska Peninsula is a peninsula extending about to the southwest from the mainland of Alaska and ending in the Aleutian Islands. The peninsula separates the Pacific Ocean from Bristol Bay, an arm of the Bering Sea....
. In real life, this volcano has not erupted for many years—but in the novel, Mount Trident vents sulfur dioxide into the air, and this gas settles into the valley where Valkerie is encamped. She barely survives the experience, at one point taking the air from the tires of her Jeep, which is the only air available for her to breathe.
The next morning, the Chief Administrator of NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
, together with one of NASA's senior physicians, lands on the slope of Mount Trident in a helicopter. They are looking for Valkerie, because they wish to interview her for a position as an Astronaut
Astronaut
An astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft....
Candidate. The conversation that follows is very confusing to both sides, chiefly because Valkerie is convinced that Mount Trident is about to erupt and all three must evacuate at once. Eventually, however, Valkerie climbs aboard the helicopter with the two NASA officials.
Eventually she is summoned to Houston, Texas, and reports for training at NASA's headquarters complex. A hot dispute between the NASA Administrator and Nate Harrington, the Mars Mission Director, results in her beginning a training regimen that is more grueling than usual, leading her to believe that Harrington wants her dropped from the program on any pretext he can invent. But in fact the NASA brass are very much impressed with her academic record and her seemingly unique ability to cope with "five-sigma" days—days remarkable for a series of dire, often life-threatening crises. (Her breathing the air in her Jeep tires to survive the fumarolic venting incident is a case in point.) As for Mr. Harrington, he has never wanted anything more than to have the NASA administrator respect his prerogatives as Mars Mission Director—and furthermore, he is distracted by a series of events that have nothing to do with Valkerie or her candidacy.
Nate's distractions include: a serious budget problem that has forced NASA to sell exclusive broadcast rights to a major television network, a clear threat from a prominent US Senator that he "has the votes" to terminate NASA's flagship program, a compromise of project security that darkly suggests a terrorist plot against NASA (and requires him to have an FBI agent as a semi-regular on the NASA campus)--and a controversy involving the crew selection for Ares 10, which is to be the first crewed mission to Mars. NASA's psychiatrists have abruptly demanded interviews with all members of the Ares 10 crew—Josh Bennett, Kennedy Hampton, Alexis "Lex" Ohta, and Bob "Kaggo" Kaganovski. Bob in particular fears that the psychiatrists want to remove him from the crew—because he has never felt entirely secure in his position, mainly because he does not have the devil-may-care abandon that is part of the "astronaut stereotype" and which Kennedy displays in overabundance. So when the psychiatrists call him in for an interview, he tells them that he would gladly obey any order given him by Josh, the assigned mission commander—not mentioning that he always reserves the right to act as he sees fit if he thinks that Josh, or any other commander, has issued a wrong order.
But the psychiatrists are not suspicious of Bob at all, but rather of Josh. Specifically, their protocols inform them that having one man, even the mission commander, dominate the crew is a recipe for disaster. Bob's interview, added to an earlier interview given by Kennedy, only add to their disquiet. During their deliberations, they then run a computer-based decision-analytic model on two possible crew complements—one including Josh, and the other removing Josh as mission commander and assigning Valkerie Jansen to the flight. To everyone's surprise, a crew complement that includes Valkerie scores very high on their decision-analytic indices.
Thus the psychiatrists issue their final "recommendation," which carries the force of an order: Josh Bennett is to be dropped from the crew, Kennedy Hampton is to be promoted to mission commander, and the crew will gain a new mission specialist: Valkerie Jansen.
Valkerie feels doubly guilty about accepting the assignment. First, she sees herself as usurping the place of another, more experienced astronaut (Josh). Second, she is afraid that a prior association will return to haunt her—specifically, her relationship with a fellow student at Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
University who killed himself in a laboratory explosion he had caused because of his notion of Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
duty. (This bombing incident took place during the heyday of Operation Rescue
Operation Rescue
Operation Rescue is a pro-life organization which originated in California and is now based in Kansas....
--and furthermore, the presence of a religious-motivated picket line at NASA's main gate only adds to her apprehensions about having her Christian associations revealed.)
Josh is ignorant of her fears concerning her Christian associations, but recognizes that she might feel guilty over supplanting him. So he takes her on a training flight to the Kennedy Space Center
Kennedy Space Center
The John F. Kennedy Space Center is the NASA installation that has been the launch site for every United States human space flight since 1968. Although such flights are currently on hiatus, KSC continues to manage and operate unmanned rocket launch facilities for America's civilian space program...
and there tells her that her primary duty is to Project Ares, which will shut down completely if she does not accept the assignment. He gallantly offers to take personal responsibility for her remaining training. With this assurance, she returns to Houston and tells Nate Harrington that she will accept the assignment.
Launch--and Disaster
In January 2014, Ares 10 launches into space. The launch is very violent, because the mission controllers decide to launch in the face of a crosswind that exceeds NASA's stated limits. This causes damage to multiple habitat systems, including the telemetry bus, the Ku-band antenna, and a solar panel. Valkerie develops serious doubts about continuing the mission, especially when she catches Kennedy in a lie about a chemical fluid spill (he says that he spilled juice from a snack container, but Valkerie knows better) and then appears to threaten her with the non-regulation acetylene blowtorch he has brought aboard. Bob is actually no more eager to continue than Valkerie. But Kennedy insists on continuing the mission and browbeats his crew into telling Houston that they are all agreed. Subsequently, they perform trans-Martian injection, thus committing themselves.Three months later, they have (finally!) repaired their data telemetry bus, and Kennedy and Bob perform an EVA to repair the Ku-band antenna, a repair that would have been pointless before. After completing the repair, they proceed to inspect the dual solar panels to see whether they can repair the damaged panel. Bob discovers some stray exposed wires that do not appear on anyone's schematics of the habitat. He proceeds to test them with a multimeter
Multimeter
A multimeter or a multitester, also known as a VOM , is an electronic measuring instrument that combines several measurement functions in one unit. A typical multimeter may include features such as the ability to measure voltage, current and resistance...
--and by a fateful error, sets the multimeter to measure resistance rather than electromotive potential ("voltage"). As a result, he inadvertently bridges a circuit between the wires—and thus causes an explosion. Someone has, quite simply, planted a bomb on board, and Bob has triggered it.
The explosion blows away the otherwise intact solar panel, compromises the hull, and dazes Bob and fills his arm with what turns out to be stainless-steel shrapnel—a detail whose full significance the astronauts will realize only much later. Valkerie, standing by in the EVA suit room, immediately (a) suits up, (b) places the unconscious Lex Ohta into a rescue bubble, (c) hastily repairs the hull breach, and (d) releases the remaining oxygen from the fuel-cell tanks. Only then can she open the airlock to admit Kennedy, who at first insists that Bob is dead. Valkerie, believing that Kennedy acted carelessly, goes outside to fetch him in.
Presently Bob recovers enough to discover that Valkerie's repair was incomplete, and simply asks her to help him make a more complete repair. But as a result of the original hull breach and Valkerie's incomplete repair efforts, the crew no longer has enough oxygen on board to survive the transit to Mars. Neither will they have sufficient power for all ship's systems from the remaining solar panel when they reach Mars. When NASA—represented by a very shaken Josh Bennett as CapCom—fails to inform them of this fact in a timely fashion, the astronauts bleakly conclude that they can no longer trust NASA.
A life-or-death choice
Josh Bennett refuses to give up on the crew. He remembers that an Earth Return Vehicle is on its way to Mars at the same time, and proposes to accelerate it to intercept Ares 10, so that the crew can use it as a lifeboat. Engineer Cathe Willison computes a solution for the intercept—but then points out that the oxygen will only last if two of the crew sacrifice themselves. Valkerie, however, proposes another solution: observing that Lex, who is still in a coma, is consuming less oxygen, she proposes that two other astronauts go into drug-induced comas, with one astronaut remaining awake to accomplish the rendezvous and then reawaken the rest of the crew. NASA's doctors conclude that Valkerie could in fact synthesize enough sodium pentathol to accomplish this plan. But this raises the question of which astronaut will remain awake.That question is more than academic—because a review of surveillance tapes made inside the habitat prior to launch identifies six people only who could have planted the bomb—the four members of the crew, Josh Bennett, and Nate Harrington. No one suspects Nate or Josh (not yet), and so the astronauts suspect one another—and furthermore, Kennedy is deliberately manipulating his crewmates' emotions, even to the point of crudely demanding sexual favors from Valkerie (which she refuses to grant).
Two further items of evidence eventually decide the issue in Valkerie's favor. One, Josh Bennett discovers that Kennedy in fact manipulated NASA's psychiatric brass in order to have Josh removed from the crew. Two, a computer simulation predicts that if Bob is the one to stay awake, he'll only use up all the oxygen.
Bob, ever reserving his right to act at discretion, secretly prepares a dose of sodium pentathol to use on Valkerie after she has sedated Kennedy. But at the last minute, Valkerie tells him that she forgives him for not trusting her. He cannot bring himself to rebel against Valkerie, and so allows her to sedate him.
Another disaster--and eventual landing
Valkerie now faces a problem with which she almost cannot cope: total isolation, with no one to converse with—not even Houston, because she must power down the radio to conserve energy. She spends most of the time in prayer, but mostly crying out to God to "send her an e-mail" and give her a reason to believe.As the ERV continues its approach, Valkerie asks for and receives permission to revive Bob so that he can help her pilot the habitat to a rendezvous with the ERV. Unhappily, the ERV is approaching far too fast. Valkerie's attempt to match velocity with it ends in failure, and worse—she uses up more fuel than they can spare.
With the ERV speeding past the habitat, Bob and Valkerie suddenly remember that the ERV carries a crew re-entry vehicle with its own engine. They issue orders to detach it from the ERV and bring it to a slow rendezvous—and then Valkerie makes another spacewalk to cut loose its oxygen tank and bring it aboard. Bob, in turn, receives instructions to build a Sabatier scrubber—an ultra-low-power device for removing carbon dioxide from the ship's air.
They then reawaken Kennedy, who must regain his strength to perform the landing—and then decide that the only way they can land is to abandon the original mission profile calling for a Martian orbital capture, and instead dive straight down to the Martian surface. This is an incredibly risky maneuver, one which they almost do not complete because they are about to use an aerobrake deployment system that is non-functional. (Another failure of trust is responsible for this predicament, which they avoid only by some last-minute deduction of NASA's true intentions.) They intend to land in a camp that previous missions have already established—but they end up landing too far away. However, they manage to pool their remaining oxygen to give to Bob and Kennedy, so that they can retrieve a pressurized powered rover to rescue Valkerie and Lex. When the men return, they find the women unconscious and seemingly dead—but Valkerie has found Bob's hidden dose of sodium pentathol and uses that to put her and Lex into a coma once again—so that they survive, but Valkerie suffers multiple rib fractures when Bob attempts cardiopulmonary resuscitation
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is an emergency procedure which is performed in an effort to manually preserve intact brain function until further measures are taken to restore spontaneous blood circulation and breathing in a person in cardiac arrest. It is indicated in those who are unresponsive...
.
Finally, the astronauts realize the significance of the stainless-steel shrapnel with which Bob had been wounded in the initial explosion. None of the ship's systems was made of stainless steel—in fact, the lack of any material but plastic was a source of great frustration to Valkerie when she first attempted to seal the hull breach. Valkerie and Lex realize that the stainless steel must have come from a bacterial culture vial that Josh Bennett had received from a former girlfriend in Antarctica—and that the vial contained a radiation-resistant bacterium, the same one that in fact had contaminated some of the ship's systems after the explosion. Now the astronauts realize what has happened to them: Josh Bennett, fearing cancellation of Project Ares and the disbanding of NASA, sought to "seed" a radio-resistant bacterium on Mars for the astronauts to "discover." To accomplish this, he did plant a bomb on board, designed to detonate with the deployment of the aerobrakes. But the damage to the habitat on the rocky launch ultimately caused the bomb to detonate in transit. This also explains Josh's brittle emotional state—he realizes that his attempt to give the astronauts something to discover very nearly killed them instead. Bob ultimately tells Josh that Valkerie has figured it out, and that they all forgive him for what he did, knowing as they do that he never meant them any harm.
The last scene is a set-up for the sequel: Bob, who is now enamored of Valkerie, proposes marriage to her before a worldwide six-billion-strong television audience that has tuned into watch "the first two astronauts to walk on Mars."
Characters in Oxygen
- AstronautAstronautAn astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft....
Joshua "Josh" Bennett, original Mission Commander, afterwards CapCom. - Astronaut Kennedy "The Hampster" Hampton, original Pilot Officer, afterwards Mission Commander.
- Astronaut Alexis "Lex" Ohta, original Mission Specialist (Geology), afterwards Pilot Officer.
- Astronaut Bob "Kaggo" Kaganovski, Mission Specialist (Engineering)
- Astronaut Candidate Valerie "Valkerie" Jansen, eventual Mission Specialist (Life Sciences and Crew Medicine)
- Nathan "Nate" Harrington, Mars Mission Director
- Steven Perez, Chief Administrator, NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
- Robert Abrams, MD, senior psychiatrist, NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
- Special Agent Crystal Yamaguchi, FBI
- Cathe Willison, engineer
Major themes
Space exploration, the importance of friendship, the power of prayer and faith, the Providential nature of God, and how sometimes humans fail to hear the voice of God because "He won't send an e-mail."Allusions/references to other works
It contains scattered allusions to Star TrekStar Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
, and more specifically to which characters in that 1960's television series are most analogous to various positions on a Mars crew.
The narrative also contains an allusion to The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff (book)
The Right Stuff is a 1979 book by Tom Wolfe about the pilots engaged in U.S. postwar experiments with experimental rocket-powered, high-speed aircraft as well as documenting the stories of the first Project Mercury astronauts selected for the NASA space program...
, by describing Astronaut Kennedy Hampton as being an astronaut in the "fighter jock" mold—addicted to flying as a physical sport, given to moderately heavy social drinking, sometimes given to driving while intoxicated, and accepting questionable attentions from female hangers-on, also known as groupie
Groupie
A groupie is a person who seeks emotional and sexual intimacy with a musician or other celebrity. "Groupie" is derived from group in reference to a musical group, but the word is also used in a more general sense, especially in casual conversation....
s. (Note: this novel is devoid of any sexual content beyond Astronaut Hampton crudely soliciting a sexual bribe from Astronaut Jansen, who indignantly refuses.)
Allusions/references to actual history, current science, and popular culture
Oxygen makes repeated and obvious references to the near-disastrous Apollo 13Apollo 13
Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST. The landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the service module upon which the Command...
mission.
The Mars Habitat Unit, the Earth Return Vehicle, the Ares Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle
Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle
A Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle, or HLLV, is a launch vehicle capable of lifting more mass into Low Earth Orbit than Medium Lift or Mid-Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles.There is no universally accepted capability requirements for heavy-lift launch vehicles....
, and various other pieces of equipment are all products of the active research program of Mars Society
Mars Society
The Mars Society is an international space advocacy non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the human exploration and settlement of the planet Mars. It was founded by Robert Zubrin and others in 1998 and attracted the support of notable science fiction writers and filmmakers, including Kim...
under the directorship of Doctor Robert Zubrin
Robert Zubrin
Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer and author, best known for his advocacy of the manned exploration of Mars. He was the driving force behind Mars Direct—a proposal intended to produce significant reductions in the cost and complexity of such a mission...
. The mission profile is an adaptation of NASA's own Mars Design Reference Mission profile, which itself derives from the Mars Society's own Mars Semi-Direct Mission profile.
The following real-life institutions and events bear direct reference in Oxygen: the United States Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
, NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
, and the National Football League
National Football League
The National Football League is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing...
(and its premier event, the Super Bowl
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League , the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather...
). Specifically:
- A US Senator threatens to terminate Project Ares and even NASA itself.
- NASA commits with NBC to launch Ares 10 the day before the Super Bowl, on a transit timed to have it land on Mars on Independence DayIndependence Day (United States)Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain...
. This is not an optimal launch profile, and as such it is a source of tremendous frustration and consternation on the part of everyone involved, not least the crew.
Literary significance & criticism
Oxygen is one of few novels to propose that astronauts might not be the unblemished heroes of the popular legend that has grown about them. This legend dates back to Projects Apollo, Gemini, and especially Mercury. Though the author Tom WolfeTom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...
(The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff (book)
The Right Stuff is a 1979 book by Tom Wolfe about the pilots engaged in U.S. postwar experiments with experimental rocket-powered, high-speed aircraft as well as documenting the stories of the first Project Mercury astronauts selected for the NASA space program...
) has definitively revealed that the Mercury astronauts were not unblemished heroes (with the possible exception of John Glenn
John Glenn
John Herschel Glenn, Jr. is a former United States Marine Corps pilot, astronaut, and United States senator who was the first American to orbit the Earth and the third American in space. Glenn was a Marine Corps fighter pilot before joining NASA's Mercury program as a member of NASA's original...
), the notion of an astronaut deliberately manipulating his administrative superiors to influence a flight assignment, and another astronaut resorting to planting a "discoverable scientific find" in order to ensure continuance of his country's space program, might have proved difficult for readers to accept.
The jarring portrait of NASA's finest might serve as one possible explanation for the lack of continued interest in this title. However, Christian critics have consistently praised the work, perhaps because it unabashedly demonstrates that no human beings deserve placement on any sort of pedestal, and that all human beings are quite capable of making mistakes, often disastrous ones, even with the best of intentions.
By far, however, the greatest significance of works like this is that they seek to bridge the gap between faith on one side, and pure and applied science on the other. Oxygen forthrightly addresses certain areas of science that might appear to test the Christian faith quite sorely—among them the very possibility of finding living organisms on a world other than earth. Regrettably, Oxygen does not offer any explanation that might reconcile the disparate concepts of life on worlds beyond earth, and God having created life on earth and only on earth. One possible explanation might be that Mars harbors living organisms carried to it in the event that caused the Noachic Flood
Noah's Ark
Noah's Ark is a vessel appearing in the Book of Genesis and the Quran . These narratives describe the construction of the ark by Noah at God's command to save himself, his family, and the world's animals from the worldwide deluge of the Great Flood.In the narrative of the ark, God sees the...
. (See especially the article on Hydroplates.) But neither this novel nor its sequel discuss that possibility at all—possibly because the theory remains controversial. Instead, they offer an assurance that the Christian faith is strong enough to stand any test, including a scientific finding that might on the surface appear to contradict Scripture. (In fact, Scripture is silent on the nature of the planets, and indeed on all celestial bodies, except the sun, moon, and stars.)
Awards and nominations
Oxygen won the 2002 Christy AwardChristy Award
The Christy Awards are awarded each year to recognize novels of excellence written from a Christian worldview. Awards are given in several genres, including contemporary , historical, romance , suspense, and visionary...
for the best futuristic Christian novel
Christian novel
A Christian novel is any novel that expounds and illustrates a Christian world view in its plot, its characters, or both, or which deals with Christian themes in a positive way.-The tradition of Christian fiction:...
in its year of release.
Allusions/references from other works
The novel is a prequel to The Fifth ManThe Fifth Man (novel)
The Fifth Man is a futuristic Christian novel by John B. Olson and Randall S. Ingermanson.-Plot introduction:The first crew to land on Mars discovers signs of microbial life--and might be dealing with a threat from much larger forms of life....
, in which most of the above-listed characters reappear.