SOLVED. Science Fiction - One scene: Astronauts land on a new planet (Mars?) to find a couple college students sitting on lawn chairs in home-made space suits with air hoses leading through a portal back to Earth. [s]

[Roxanne]

I can only remember this one scene which is used to explain how brilliant one of the characters is. Astronauts land on a new planet (Mars?) to find a couple college students sitting on lawn chairs in home-made space suits with air hoses leading through a portal back to Earth. The brilliant inventor becomes an excentric recluse. I think the main character is the daughter of the inventor's business partner. I read this in within the last decade and it did not seem like an old book at the time.

[Mai]

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton (part of the Commonwealth Saga)?
"The book opens with a short section providing backstory. As part of the first mission to Mars, a team of astronauts exits their spacecraft for the first time, only to see another man standing there, connected to an air hose that leads through a wormhole to a laboratory in California. The wormhole generator's inventors, Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaacs, chose to test it by beating the crew, by moments, to be the first human on Mars. The saga then moves onto the Commonwealth era in 2380, when humanity has used the wormhole technology to colonise several hundred planets across hundreds of light years."

[Roxanne]

Yes, that is it. Thank you. I was thinking it might have been Hamilton, but the Gragory Mandel series, and when that didn't pan out I started looking to other authors.