Description:

In an effort to promote world peace, America embarks on its final lunar mission, to retrieve nuclear warheads placed on the moon during the 1960s at the height of the Cold War.

From Library Journal

In another alternative history, the U.S. space program begins in 1944. But now interest in nonmilitary space exploration has waned, and funding for the program has diminished. Commander Gene Parnell heads a team shuttling from Earth to the lunar Tranquility Base to launch six Minutemen II rockets into the sun before turning the base over to a German aerospace company. The mission may be foiled, for an imposter among the crew plans to sabotage the launch. Steele vividly re-creates the experience of manned space flight through excellent technical detail. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hard-sf veteran Steele takes America's faltering space program for a wry spin in this clever, suspenseful alternative-history novel. After 50 years of extraordinary progress that includes manned spaceflight in 1944, a giant orbiting station called the Wheel, and a 1976 Mars expedition led by Neil Armstrong, the U.S. space program is dying out. NASA's final moon mission takes place in 1995, and the crew must dismantle a nuclear missile base, deemed unnecessary thanks to the cold war's thawing. Veteran astronaut Gene Parnell and crew are instead sent, along with computer hacker Paul Dooley, to turn the base over to the rising European space program and to launch the missiles into the sun. Shortly before liftoff, though, Dooley is replaced by an impostor, and at least three other crew members have a hidden agenda that includes retargeting the warheads toward Earth. Alternative history rarely works without some oblique commentary on our own times, which Steele slyly delivers in snippets from skewed news reports in one of his best efforts to date. Carl Hays