Sex on the Moon Read Online Free PDF

leg of the fifteen-hundred-mile trip from Salt Lake City to Houston, and the other half moving into a shared apartment adjacent to the campus, which he had found on a NASA employee classified-ads list the week before.
    Less than ten minutes later, Thad found his way out of the tourist parking lot and onto an access road that led to the real JSC, which, as the kid in the space suit had correctly pointed out, was right next door. Thad knew for certain that he was on the right path when he caught sight of a mean-looking security gate barring the way ahead, attached to a rectangular kiosk with Plexiglas windows and floodlights hanging from each corner. Beyond the gate, Thad could make out a patchwork of asphalt lanes bisecting a pretty, rolling campus of green glades, low hedges, and boxlike buildings. He could also see objects in the distance that looked like oversized radar dishes and even a few buildings that reminded him of farm silos. Some of the buildings seemed modern, despite their 1950s-style exteriors, but a few of the complexes could easily have dated back to before the first moon landing.
    The three oversized men in the security kiosk certainly fit the mid-century ethos: square-jawed, crew-cut, in gray-on-gray uniforms bearing the NASA emblem on the lapel and shoulder. As Thad pulled up next to the kiosk, one of the three leaned outside, holding out a beefy hand that looked more like a paw.
    Thad rolled down his window and extended his driver’s license, as well as the printed co-op acceptance form he’d received from Bob Musgrove in the mail, just a few days earlier. The guard took both, checking them against a list taped to the inside of the kiosk door.
    “Welcome to NASA,” the man said, handing Thad back his license. “Speed limit inside the campus is five miles per hour. Any faster, and we’ll send a car after you. Oh, and since you don’t have your ID yet, you’ll have to park in the satellite lot. Once you’re through the gate, go about a hundred yards and take a right at the rocket.”
    Thad looked at him. The guard grinned back.
    “You’re a co-op, right? That means you’re supposed to be some sort of a genius. You’ll figure it out.”
    With that, the man retreated to the crisp air of his kiosk, shutting the door behind him. He hit a switch on the security console and the gate swung upward. Thad pressed lightly on the gas, inching the Toyota up to five miles per hour.
    The first stretch of road inside the JSC was fairly unremarkable, bordered on both sides by green grass, swampy-looking trenches, and some oversized hedges. But just as he made the first turn, Thad passed one of the high hedges and saw something through his windshield that nearly made him slam on the brakes. Stretched out along the entire right side of the road was a huge, cylindrical rocket. The thing was truly massive, over 360 feet from the rounded command module attached to the rocket’s tip to the huge, jutting nozzles of the first of five fuel capsules that made up its cylindrical body. Blindingly white in the Texan sun, the thing could not be described as anything but beautiful.
    Thad had read about the Saturn V rocket, but seeing it up close, just lying in a glade of grass at the opening of the JSC campus, was truly awe-inspiring. He remembered from his reading that this specific rocket had never been to space—it had been built for the two Apollo missions that were canceled at the end of the space race—but its sisters had carried every lunar orbiting and landing crew that had made the journey to the moon, and this beauty, though dormant and beginning to mold, had once been fully functional. In person, the scale of the thing brought home to Thad where he was: this wasn’t some museum or amusement park; this was a place where real men and women trained to go into space, carried by machines such as the Saturn V. Christ, what it must have been like, being strapped to a beast like that, hitting speeds that made your skin