Kevin Owens is a studly graduate of the Air Force Academy and the youngest astronaut on the planet. He has been groomed by NASA to lead a civilian crew of two men and three woman to colonize a planet outside the solar system. It is a one-way mission with a flight exceeding eight years. The US Space Force and NASA tell the public the objective is interstellar exploration. But Owen cannot disclose the real reason Can NASA find qualified men and women willing to give up their life on Earth to undertake such a dangerous mission? How could NASA select a crew that would not be at each other's throats while confined to a spacecraft for more than eight years? Will their mutual attraction work, or will jealousy and infighting doom the objective? Does life exist outside the solar system? Is the exoplanet destination supportive of human life? Or is this mission truly impossible as the media believes? What hazards threaten the crew as they traverse the solar system? The asteroid belt? The Kuiper belt? The Oort cloud? Interstellar space? Can they rely on the latest supercomputer to navigate through it all? What happens to the voyagers as their spacecraft approaches the speed of light? Does Einstein's relativity kick in? Can Houston Mission Control save them when the communication time delay exceeds years? KURTH KRAUSE is the author of "My 36 Years in Space," an autobiography of his career as an astronautical engineer instrumental in the United States manned space programs and classified satellite surveillance programs. He earned his BS with a double major in mathematics and physics at the university of Wisconsin, majored in astronautical guidance in graduate school at MIT, and studied management at the Stanford Executive Institute and the UCLA Graduate School of Management.As a space pioneer, Krause wrote guidance and navigation software for the Apollo Command Module and the Lunar Module which flew in every Apollo, Skylab, and Apollo/Soyuz mission in 1968-72. He received awards from NASA, MIT, and TRW. He witnessed the historic launch of Apollo 11 from the astronaut viewing area in 1969. Krause was in the Houston Mission Control Center during the first lunar landing by Armstrong and Aldrin.