Jade Greenway grows up with two heroes that guide her life, her grandfather who died flying Navy jets over Korea, and Sally Ride who was the first American woman in space.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in physics and her master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, Jade, now a Navy officer, begins flight training in Florida and Texas, where she meets Captain Richard Quincy, who will change her life.
When the law is changed to allow women in combat, she is sent to Miramar Naval Air Station in California, to become an F-14 fighter pilot. Over the next several years she rises through the ranks to become squadron commander.
Over the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq, she earns the Distinguished Flying Cross medal twice, and the Purple Heart medal for injuries she receives. While flying over Bosnia in support of NATO action there, a surface-to-air missile hits her aircraft destroying one engine and severely injuring her crewman. Forced to crash into the sea and suffering injuries of her own, she is nevertheless able to get the unconscious crewman out of the aircraft and keep him afloat for more than an hour in heavy seas until rescued. For her actions, she is awarded the Navy Cross, the Nation’s second highest award for valor.
While recuperating in the hospital, NASA invites her to join them. She goes back to MIT for her PhD in astrophysics, and becomes project scientist for a planned mission to the Moon on what will become known as Flight of the Messenger.
As Captain Jade Greenway and her two-man crew are approaching the Moon in the Messenger spacecraft a huge meteor strikes Messenger sending it hurling through space away from the Moon. One man is killed instantly; the other man is severely injured including a punctured lung. Jade has a broken arm and ribs, and vital oxygen is leaking to space.
Jade must find a way to bring her damaged spacecraft and her dead and dying crew back to earth, with no computers working, no communications working, and vital oxygen slowing leaking to space.