so by recycling older spacecraft for several purposes: space shuttle Atlantis is refitted to carry cargo into orbit as well as a restored Saturn V for construction of the main ship (a heavily modified version of Discovery using the Shuttle OMS engines for chemical propulsion and powered by a TOPAZ nuclear reactor), using habitat modules from the mothballed International Space Station, and Apollo re-entry capsules are adapted to become Titan landers. On the day of the last launch to begin the mission, with the shuttle Endeavour ready to carry the crew to space, an insane USAF general driven by shallow militarism and hatred for space exploration tries to shoot down the shuttle during lift off. Despite damage sustained from an anti-satellite missile fired from a restored X-15, Endeavour successfully makes it into orbit, and the five crew members begin their six-year journey to Saturn by following the gravity-assisted Interplanetary Transport Network. En route, Siohban Libet, one of the astronauts, dies after a solar storm. The use of a CELSS greenhouse for life support provides a continuous food supply, and the astronauts rely on vegetables, grain and fruit from the greenhouse as they travel on, and dispose of waste via supercritical water oxidation. But things take a dark turn as funding and support for resupply and Earth-return retrieval are cut by Maclachlan's administration (proposed and carried out by the very same men that tried to shoot the shuttle down), leaving the team with no hope for survival beyond what they may find on Titan. Once they reach Saturn and prepare to land on Titan's surface, another crew member is lost during the landing procedure with another effectively crippled. Titan is discovered to be a bleak, freezing dwarf-planet containing liquid ethane oceans, a sticky mud-like surface composed of tholins, and a climate which includes a thick atmosphere of purple organic compounds falling like snow from the clouds; and the only traces of life they find are fossilised remains of microbic bacteria similar to those recovered from Martian meteorites. The remaining astronauts relay their findings back to a largely uninterested Earth. Meanwhile, the Chinese, to retaliate for biological attacks by the US, send an astronaut(incidentally the first Chinese to go into space) to cause a huge explosion next to an asteroid (2002OA)in a suicide attack, with the aim of deflecting it into Earth orbit and threatening the world with targeted precision strikes in