The Teleporter

Four former University of Tennessee at Chattanooga fraternity brothers had returned to the school to attend the intuition's Home Coming Events and renew old acquaintances. The men in their comfortable mid-life careers sat around a felt-topped gaming table in the spacious library room of Wesley Knowles' mansion in the up-scale Riverview area of Chattanooga, Tennessee and plotted the future. Wes had made them an offer they couldn't refuse. The federal government had offered a billion dollar prize for the first private company that could put four people on the surface of Mars and return them to Earth. The men formed the Mars Group and, with the help of ex-NASA employees and Dr. Zhang, a physicist with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, commenced to plan and build a state of the art spaceship for the year-long voyage out into our Inner Solar System to Mars, a 310 million mile odyssey into space where no earthling had been before.