The Relentless Moon characters

Appears from the start

An astronaut and pilot, and the wife of Kansas governor Kenneth Wargin, moving between the space program and national politics with practiced ease. She flew during the war, and her service there was not confined to a cockpit, leaving her with a facility for locks, languages and quiet observation that her colleagues in the corps know nothing about. She is disciplined to the point of harm about her body and her appetite, a private struggle she manages alone, and she is a great deal more capable and more calculating than the political-wife role she performs in public suggests.

Appears from the start

Governor of Kansas and Nicole's husband, an experienced and genuinely affectionate political partner who is preparing a run for the presidency. Their marriage is a working alliance as well as a real one, and his candidacy puts him at the center of a national argument about whether a damaged country can keep affording the space program.

First appears in chapter 4

The space coalition's lead engineer and the husband of Elma York, who is away on the Mars expedition for the duration of this book. He runs the technical side of a program that has started suffering failures it cannot explain, and he is one of the few people with a complete picture of what is going wrong.

First appears in chapter 6

A computer for the space coalition, married to the astronaut Eugene Lindholm, and one of the people Nicole trusts without reservation. Sharp, observant and long accustomed to being underestimated, she is well placed to notice the things that do not add up.

First appears in chapter 6

A Black astronaut who flew with the Tuskegee airmen during the war and one of the corps' most experienced pilots, now senior among the personnel at the lunar base. Steady and widely liked, he carries responsibility for a colony whose margins for error are extremely thin.

Also known as the Lady Astronaut

Appears from the start

The most famous figure the space program has, and Nicole's colleague from the first class of women admitted to the astronaut corps. She is currently years away aboard the first Mars expedition, reachable only by message across a long delay, and her absence is a constant fact of the year this book covers.

First appears in chapter 12

A former wartime pilot turned writer who has covered the space program for years and knows everyone in it. She is good company, well informed and always working, and by this point she is close enough to the program to be inside rather than outside it.