The Astronaut Who Never Came Back

Produced by J.August Jackson with support from ChatGPT, MidJourney, and ElevenLabs. A podcast version is available on Spotify.

It started with an email.

Most things do.

No subject line. No signature. Just a message from an encrypted address I didn’t recognize.

“He’s not dead. He’s been sending messages for years.”

Attached was a single audio file, only a few seconds long. It was mostly static, but there was a voice buried inside it—faint, distorted. I played it back ten times, trying to make sense of it. Somewhere in the mess of static and interference, just before the clip cut off, I heard a name:

“Liz.”

The voice sounded exhausted. Desperate. Familiar. And after about fifteen minutes of research, I figured out who it belonged to.

Major Tom Raines. U.S. Air Force, and one of NASA’s golden boys from their Artemis program.

Officially, he was listed as the commander of Project Artemis-12, an experimental low-Earth orbit mission that ended in disaster. According to NASA’s press release at the time, his ship had suffered a catastrophic systems failure shortly after launch. No one ever found the capsule—or him.

That’s where the story was supposed to end.

But a little digging turned up rumors—whispers, really—about a second mission. Unofficial, unacknowledged. There were hints buried in the fine print of government contracts, traces in budget allocations shuffled through private contractors. It didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge.

The U.S. wasn’t just running near-Earth test flights under Artemis. There was something bigger—a covert, high-priority mission. One with a destination that no one wanted to admit out loud.

Mars.

Which brings us to Tom Raines.

The mission he led wasn’t an Artemis test flight. That was just the cover story. In reality, Raines and his crew were part of a classified operation, the first of its kind—a mission to land on Mars and establish a forward presence. The official narrative about equipment failure was a convenient lie, wrapped in layers of plausible deniability.

In truth, the mission didn’t just fail. It disappeared.

I found Elizabeth Raines, Tom’s wife, living alone in a modest house outside Denver. It took two days of calls to convince her to meet with me. She opened the door with bloodshot eyes, looking more tired than angry. Like someone who’d already had this conversation a thousand times with herself.

“What do you want?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest.

I told her I was investigating old Artemis missions, and I’d come across some unusual… evidence. I didn’t get far before she tried to shut the door in my face.

“I’ve heard Tom’s voice,” I said. That stopped her cold.

Ten minutes later, we were sitting in her dim living room. The furniture was neat but old, the kind of things people stop replacing after they lose someone. She handed me a battered laptop, the screen cracked in the corner.

She opened a folder labeled “Messages.”

Inside were hundreds of audio files—thousands, maybe. I clicked on the most recent one.

Static, like before. But underneath it, faint and distant, was a voice:

“Liz… I’m still here.”

It was Tom. His voice was frayed, strained, but there was no mistaking it.

Elizabeth watched me carefully, arms crossed tight against her chest. “NASA called me crazy,” she said flatly. “They said it’s interference. Random signals bouncing off satellites.”

I didn’t say anything. I clicked on another file.

“It’s cold down here, Liz. But I found something. There’s something down here with me.”

The message crackled, cutting in and out. His voice sounded distant, like it had been dragged across light-years. Then it cut to silence.

According to Elizabeth, the first message came about a year after Tom’s mission was officially declared lost. At first, she thought it was a cruel prank. But the messages kept coming, each one more unsettling than the last.

Sometimes Tom sounded calm, like he was leaving a voicemail from another continent. Other times, his voice was shaky, terrified. And then there were the long, silent stretches—minutes of nothing but dead air, like he was waiting for her to speak.

“What do you think they are?” I asked quietly.

Elizabeth shook her head. “I think… he’s still on Mars. And he’s trying to get home.”

NASA denied everything, of course. They told her that the audio was just radio interference. Maybe an old signal bouncing off the ionosphere, they said. Completely normal. Nothing to worry about.

But Elizabeth wasn’t buying it. “They know,” she said, her voice sharp with anger. “They know exactly where he is—and they left him there.”

I took a copy of the files home that night and spent the next two days listening to every one. Most of the messages were short—fragments of thought, half-finished sentences—but a few stood out.

“There are others down here, Liz. Not human. Not like us.”

“They… they don’t want us to leave.”

“I tried to signal the crew, but something’s blocking me. I think they knew. They knew we wouldn’t come back.”

I felt a chill crawl down my spine. The more I listened, the more the pieces began to fit together. This wasn’t just a failed mission. Something—or someone—had made sure Tom Raines would never come back.

Using every connection I had, I traced the source of the transmissions. It took calls to hackers, rogue radio operators, and two very shady satellite engineers. Finally, I got a hit.

The signal wasn’t coming from Mars.

It was coming from low Earth orbit.

The implications hit me like a punch to the gut.

If Tom Raines was alive, then he wasn’t on Mars—at least, not anymore. And if he was broadcasting from orbit, it meant someone had brought him back… or at least tried to.

That’s when my phone buzzed. It was Elizabeth.

“You need to stop,” she whispered. “They know you’re looking.”

Before I could respond, the line went dead.

And now here I am, sitting in front of my laptop, listening to Tom’s voice on a loop.

“Liz… don’t stop. I know you can find me.”

I don’t know what’s worse—that he’s out there, somewhere, waiting for someone to find him—or that someone has been keeping him trapped all along.

Either way, I’m not stopping.

I think I just found my next lead.