Dark Force
Akira Inagaki – fourteen year-old Japanese boy living in Hiroshima in 1945
Kaiya – Akira’s mother
Yori – Kaiya’s wife and father to Akira
Timeless Journey
Ayak Svenson, aka “Traveller 1960” – Swedish Under-Secretary – General (USG) of the United Nations
Athanasia – solonaut and commander of the Monarch spaceship
Invincible – head of intergalactic space
Dark Force
Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr – commander of the 509th Composite Group of the United States Army Air Forces and pilot of “Enola Gay”
Commander William S. “Deak” Parsons – ballistics expert onboard “Enola Gay” in charge of assembling world’s first atomic bomb
Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jepson – the electronics test officer and assistant to Parsons
Major Thomas Ferebee – bombardier
Captain Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk – chief navigator of “Enola Gay”
Major James Hopkins, Jr – Operations Officer for the US Air Corps
Franklin Roosevelt – US president at outbreak of World War 2
Dr Vannevar Bush – Director of the Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and head of all US scientific wartime projects
Winston Churchill – Prime Minister of Britain at time of World War 2
Arthur Compton – Nobel prize-winning physicist assigned overall responsibility for the physics of atomic bomb development
Dr Robert Oppenheimer – Scientific director of the Manhattan Project
Major-General Leslie “Dick” Groves, Army Corps of Engineers – Military director of the Manhattan Project
Henry Stimson – US Secretary of War
George Catlett Marshall Jr. – Chief of Staff, United States Army during World War 2
Dr Bob Serber – principal scientific assistant to Oppenheimer
Harry S. Truman – successor to President Roosevelt
Admiral D. Leahy – Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War 2
James F. Byrnes – U.S. Secretary of State 1945-1947
General Thomas Handy – US Acting Chief of Staff during World War 2
General Carl Spaatz – Commanding officer of the Army Strategic Air Forces
General Henry Arnold – Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces
General Douglas MacArthur – Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area
Yamaguchi Tsutomu – submarine designer from Nagasaki
Morris “Dick” Jeppson – weapons specialist onboard “Enola Gay”
Victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima
The Spaceman
Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin – Russian cosmonaut and first man in space
Sergei Korolev – Soviet aerospace engineer, Chief Designer of Russian space programme at OKB-1 Special Design Bureau
Mstislav Keldysh – Soviet Theoretician of Cosmonautics
Mikhail Tikhonravov – Soviet rocket scientist and lead engineer behind Sputnik and design of Vostok space capsule
General Nikolai Kamanin – chief of cosmonaut training
Gai Severin – Soviet spacesuit designer
Oleg Ivanovsky – Senior engineer reporting to Korolev
Valentin Glushko – the USSR’s leading rocket engine designer
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – influential Russian science fiction writer
Valya – wife to Yuri Gagarin
Valentin –Yuri’s older brother
Zoya – Yuri’s older sister
Boris – Yuri’s youngest brother
Alexei Gagarin – Yuri’s father
Vladimir Gorinshtein – foreman at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant in Moscow when Yuri was an apprentice
Yakov Lysenko – a tractor driver at time of Yuri’s re-entry into earth’s atmosphere
Tamara Kuchalayeva & Tatiana Makaricheva – two schoolgirls who witnessed Yuri’s descent to earth by parachute after the world’s first spaceflight
Anna Takhtarova – forest warden’s wife from the Leninsky Put collective farm
Rita – Anna’s granddaughter
Earth Rising
Neil Armstrong – US astronaut, Apollo 11 Commander and first person to walk on the moon
Dr Buzz Aldrin – Apollo 11 Lunar Module pilot and expert in space rendezvous
Michael Collins – Apollo 11 Command Module pilot
Dr Wernher von Braun – German-American pioneer of rocket technology and aerospace engineer, Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo missions
Jack King – NASA’s Public Affairs Officer who broadcast the launch of Apollo 11
Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee & Ed White – US astronauts who perished during a fire inside the Apollo 1 capsule
Vladimir Komarov – Soviet cosmonaut killed on Soyuz 1
Chris Kraft – US aeronautical engineer and NASA’s Director of Flight Operations
Deke Slayton – one of the original Mercury seven astronauts and NASA’s Chief Astronaut
Cliff Charlesworth – physicist and NASA flight director
Glynn Lunney – space engineer and NASA flight director
Gene Kranz – NASA flight director during Apollo 11 lunar landing
Gerry Griffin – specialist in guidance and navigation systems and NASA flight director
Bruce McCandless – US astronaut and CAPCOM at Mission Control during Apollo 11 mission
Charlie Duke – US astronaut and CAPCOM at Mission Control during Apollo 11 mission
Jack Garman – computer specialist and backroom engineer at Mission Control
Ron Evans – US astronaut and CAPCOM during Apollo 11 mission
Jim Lovell – US astronaut and command module pilot of Apollo 8, the first spacecraft to fly to, and orbit, the Moon
ALSO BY MICHAEL J LEE
Chrysalis: A surgical sci-fi story about immortal potential
321 Haiku
The Archive
Passage to Faith
Codebreaking our Future and Knowing our Future