Titan

From the front flap of the Voyager first edition: "To sail among the rings of Saturn... To touch the ground of a new world... and to do it now... NASA Cassini probe will reach Saturn in 2004: Titan is the story of a visionary's response to Cassini's discovery of life on Saturn's moon. Award-winning author Stephen Baxter single-handedly rescues the US manned space programme from near extinction, taking astronauts to the outer planets in this extraordinary and gripping novel. Titan is the epic saga of one woman's will to succeed and the triumph of a dream over bureaucracy and fear. Paula Benacerraf, grandmother and astronaut, is appointed to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle fleet after another Challenger-type disaster. Instead, she listens to the oddball JPL scientist Rosenberg, who is determined to explore the ammonia-based life Cassini discovers on Titan. NASA's rusting Saturn rockets, mothballed Apollo spacecraft and remaining shuttles are fitted with as much new technology as NASA can be persuaded to afford - and in the face of violent opposition from the military, frail humans are hurled to the edge of the Solar System. To the edge, also of sanity. From the acknowledged heir to the visionary legacy of Clarke and Wells, his most ambitious novel yet, a compellingly believable story of our conquest of space as it could still happen."