Ice (Johnson Novel) - Characters

Characters

• Astronaut Gary Lucas, Apollo 19 Mission Commander: Gary Lucas became an astronaut in 1965. During his training, he met and married his wife, Diane, in Cocoa Beach, Florida. They have one son, Jeff, who is ten years old at the time in which the novel takes place. Gary Lucas, lands near the Moon's south pole, near the Marlow Basin (this is the Aitken Basin in real life). He and his friend, LM Pilot Charles Shepherd, intend to explore this basin, which they believe is a massive meteoric impact crater that might contain fragments of lunar bedrock. Indeed, they find a large quantity of precious and semiprecious stones, the most colorful and valuable yet found on the Moon.
• Diane "Annie" Lucas, his wife
• Jeffrey Lucas, his son

• Astronaut Charles Shepherd, Apollo 19 Lunar Module Pilot: Charles Shepherd failed of selection as an astronaut when he first applied. But that failure afforded him the opportunity to meet his wife, Carol, also a believer. They have one young son, Joseph ("Joey"). Shortly before the launch of Apollo 19, Shepherd participated in a gambling pool to see whether his commander would succeed in making a precision landing closer than the record set by astronaut Pete Conrad in Apollo 12. The precision landing is required because part of their mission equipment is a new kind of heavy rover, delivered previously aboard an Apollo LM Truck. Astronaut Shepherd is inordinately proud of his commander, because the commander has bested Pete Conrad's old precision-landing record, thus winning Shepherd a hundred dollars in a gambling pool (see back story above). He is even happier when he and Gary Lucas, driving their heavy rover in the Marlow Basin (actually the Aitken Basin), discover an outcropping of precious and semi-precious stones—easily the most colorful geological samples ever recovered from the Moon.
• Carol Shepherd, his wife
• Joseph "Joey" Shepherd, his son

• Astronaut Victor Kendall, Apollo 19 Command Module Pilot, afterwards CapCom on White Team. He serves as the Apollo CSM pilot on this mission to the Lunar south pole. He shares in the joy that his friends, Mission Commander Gary Lucas and LM Pilot Charlie Shepherd, feel when they discover semi-precious gemstones in their landing zone—gemstones that might contribute to a debate on the continuation of Project Apollo, now slated to close down after this mission.
• Katie Kendall, his wife

• Astronaut Bruce Cortney, CapCom on White Team, afterwards Apollo 20 Mission Commander
• Astronaut James Irwin, Apollo 20 Lunar Module Pilot
• Astronaut Donald K. Slayton, Director, Astronaut Office, and Apollo 20 Command Module Pilot

• Gene Kranz, Flight Director, White Team

• Noah
• Wife of Noah
• Shem, Ham, and Japheth, sons of Noah
• Wives of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, one of whom is attacked in a burning town and escapes serious injury only with the intervention of astronaut Lucas
• Unnamed Base Commander and crew of the Antediluvian Lunar base