Space

by James A. Michener

  The reason that drew Stanley to Los Angeles this time was not aviation, but a disruptive crisis in space. A decade ago, when he was occupied with other matters, the NASA high command had spent a great deal of time and intelligence trying to devise some major operation which would replace the Apollo program, and belatedly they recognized the validity of Dieter Kolff’s persistent argument that what America needed was not something on the Moon but a floating platform in Earth orbit from which other vehicles could be launched for high-orbit work.

  But NASA went one step beyond Kolff’s prescription. Its spacecraft would be manned by astronauts who would bring it back to Earth for repeated re-uses. America would thus have a kind of inexpensive flying bus that could shuttle back and forth between Cape Canaveral and outer space.

  As soon as Mott heard of this decision, he put his finger on the real problem: “We’ve proved we can take off, maneuver and land. But what did we land? Only a minute percentage of what we took up. And it was wrapped in protective material which ablated away as it came through the fires of the upper atmosphere. No way we can ablate a whole aircraft and then use it again.”

  When he heard the proposed solution-to glue onto the leading edges of this Shuttle small, individual tiles of a [721] new material which would withstand the heat of reentry and could be used again-he was aghast: “How many different tiles will you require?”

  The answer was 31,689, and no two would match. As scientist he was satisfied that such tiles could be manufactured and that a glue could be fabricated which would hold them in place, but as an engineer he could not believe that anyone in his right mind would come up with such a complicated procedure; however, those who made the decision defended it: “Mott, we can’t use an ablating material. You pointed that out. We’ve got to have something that stays put and can be reused. So what can we use? A special copper alloy would be great, but if you covered the Shuttle with three inches of copper, there isn’t a rocket in the world that would lift it off the pad or brakes strong enough to stop it rolling when it landed. So what are you left with? We invent some new material, a new adhesive ...”

  “But why 31,000-odd tiles?”

  “Because the Shuttle will be a living, breathing, moving thing. Its various parts will interact, and if you simply plaster our new material over its face, hundreds of feet wide, inches thick, the first creaking motion in the structure would crack the protection and make it break off in huge chunks. By using the tiles, we build in 4 x 31,000 joints ... well, somewhat less because the edge of one tile makes its joint with the edge of another. You figure it out. But one hell of a lot of joints. And they give, not the whole fabric.”

  When Mott had a chance to inspect the new material these men had invented he was enchanted; a piece four inches square and an inch thick weighed about as much as a tiny box of safety matches, less, really. They glued a tile one inch thick onto his left hand and then applied a blowtorch to the outer facing, thousands of degrees hot, and the area exposed to the flame glowed a sullen red, then a white hot, but no heat came through the tile to his palm. Any structure protected by this tile could come crashing down through the atmosphere without burning up.

  However, the fitting of the tiles to the Shuttle surfaces became, as Mott predicted, a task of infuriating complexity. A company in California had to produce 31,689 [722] different, individual tiles minutely conformed to a particular spot on the Shuttle, and then apply each tile by hand in the most meticulous manner. Four different specifications were used in providing the outer facing of the tiles, depending upon how much heat each would be expected to absorb, and five different kinds of adhesive were needed to affix them.

  Furthermore, when the finished Shuttle was transported from California to Canaveral for its launch, a horrendous number of tiles worked their way off, which meant that if this had been a real flight, the Shuttle and its two-man crew could have burned up.

  So now the Shuttle was in Florida and the manufacturer of the tiles was in California, which necessitated a cross-country operation of the most complex nature. The fitters in Florida would make exact templates of the tiles they required and indicate what type of material must go into that tile, and with what surface. These specifications, with the template, were then flown to California, where highly skilled workmen, jewelers really, fashioned each tile to minute tolerances, whereupon it was flown back to Florida, tested for its waiting slot, and returned to California if even one edge or one thickness was out of line. Nearly twenty thousand times this intricate procedure had to be exercised, until an engineer like Mott shuddered. He could not imagine, not even late at night when he had had an extra beer, how such a solution had been accepted by his colleagues.

  “Didn’t they have any engineers on the board?” he asked his wife in frustration, and she countered: “What you mean is, why didn’t they have you on the board?”

  As a good soldier, and a man furiously jealous of NASA’s reputation, he never criticized the morass into which his beloved agency had fallen, but he did often speculate as to why the process of selection and verification, at which NASA had been so spectacularly successful, had this time gone awry, and in the end he had to conclude that it was that remorseless devil which haunts able men: hubris. The NASA scientists, bloated by one success after another-the Moon, Mars, Jupiter-had come to believe that they could do anything, and they saw nothing preposterous in a plan which called for the hand manufacture and hand [723] application of 31,689 different tiles. They had overlooked the fact that hand-applied meant that individual men and women, hundreds of them, would have to work years on end doing the applying, and that when they were finished, half the tiles would fall off. An experimenter can determine the ultimate security of a process only by doing it and recording the outcome.

  A week’s delay turned into a month and a month into a year, and budgets exploded as men had to be paid for the extra work. Mott cringed as ABC-TV ran frequent specials deriding the Shuttle, and he grew actually nervous-had to take an antacid to quieten his stomach-when he was required to testify before Congress as to how this awful boondoggle had occurred.

  But grimly he defended NASA, became its major spokesman in testifying both to Congress and to the press that the Shuttle would fly and that it would provide America with the space vehicle it needed. He said this so often and in such public places that he came to believe it. He defended the Shuttle before Rotary clubs, at universities, on television, and with great stubbornness among his colleagues at Houston or Huntsville.

  “The Shuttle is aerodynamically even better than we’ve been saying. The tiles are a minor problem which an improved adhesive will solve. The lift-off system is the best we’ve ever had, believe me.” He refused to concede a single weakness, and it became obvious to his associates that at the age of sixty-three, when retirement faced him, this stubborn, able man had adopted the Space Shuttle as his final contribution to NASA. As an act of will power, which his associates had often seen him exercise in the past when difficulties arose, he would force this vehicle to fly, come back through the atmosphere, and fly again.

  When a space expert from the New York Times heckled him about the cost and time overruns, he invited the learned gentleman to have a beer with him at the Dagger Bar. “Every criticism you offer makes sense. The overruns have been distressing, but remember that if you crank in the inflation factor, we’ve spent very little more than we predicted we would back in 1971. And as to the changes, I’d like to share a story with you.

  “Some years ago I met a man who had handled paper [724] work on the Navy’s PBY-5A. You may remember the original PBY, marvelous old warhorse, a seaplane that landed on the ocean to rescue downed fliers. Well, someone had the bright idea to make it amphibian, land on water if necessary, but also on land. Now, that doesn’t double the complexity, it quadruples it.

  “This fellow told me that after the manufacturer had made the plane absolutely foolproof and after the best brains in Navy procurement had approved it, and it was accepted by
Navy aviators and was flying in combat, 536 different alterations were necessary before it was first-class. That’s the nature of experimenting with a new idea You do the very best you can, and when it’s perfected in every detail, you make 536 alterations. With the Shuttle, we’re at 421-but we’re working.”

  His present job was to fly out to a remote site in the California desert where scores of technicians were fabricating the final series of tiles, the ones which curved around a bump in the Shuttle or nestled into a corner, and he could scarcely believe the intricacy of the task. Even a simple square tile, ABCD, would have markedly different slopes from A to corner B, to corner C and to corner D. while the diagonal slope from A to C would not resemble the slope from B to D. And specifications might call for any one of four mixtures in the basic material, any one of four different finishes, and any of five different glues for attaching it to the Shuttle. It was an operation of preposterous complexity and he was ashamed of the engineer who had devised it. But when he gave press interviews he defended NASA against all criticism:

  “This Shuttle will take off in March of this year. It will orbit the Earth for three days, exactly as planned, and America will be astounded by the beauty and skill of its performance. Obviously, we’re entering a new age and I assure you it will be one of endless promise.”

  But, when he was alone in his motel, unable to sleep, he would imagine what was going to happen to America’s space program if the Shuttle floundered on its initial launch or turned to flame on its attempted reentry, and he could [725] visualize the unbroken chain of disasters: ridicule in the press, sententious I-told-you-so reviews on television, pontifications in the editorials and, worst of all, direct abuse in Congress. He could see himself testifying before the Senate, with no defenders like Mike Glancey to protect either him or NASA. And then the heartbreaking images would cascade: Huntsville closing down; Wallops Island, where he had spent those wonderful days discovering the nature of the upper atmosphere, once more a bleak stretch of sand; Houston diminished; JPL, home of wizards, a warehouse.

  Be there! he would pray, for he, more than almost anyone else in America, appreciated the dreadful burden of significance the Shuttle would carry on its maiden flight: Be there! Get up high and get down safe. At dawn he would finally fall asleep, but even then he would dream of tiles breaking loose at an altitude of 550,000 feet and a temperature of 25,000° and he would wake sweating, but this continual terror he shared with no one. He had been chosen spokesman for the Shuttle and he would serve that role, a man whose unblemished performances in so many different fields gave him credibility.

  Professor Pope taught his astronomy classes at Fremont State as if he were training groups of future astronauts: “You live among the stars whether you think so or not. Like ships adrift at sea, you identify your place on Earth through your relationship to the stars, and when you leave Earth and enter the air, your plane directs itself in obedience to the position of the stars. I insist that you know where the stars are and how they look, so that you can know where you are.”

  His students spent a good deal of time in the planetarium familiarizing themselves with the heavens, and he was particularly eager to have them know the difficult southern stars which most of them would never see: “If your plane captain gets lost and lands you in Australia rather than Woonsocket, I want you to be able to find your way back to Fremont State by following the stars,” and he taught them Canopus, Achernar, and Acrux.

  He was a taskmaster, really, but the students indulged him because of what he had done when alone among his [726] stars; also, he made the work fun, for he told them of how Randy Claggett had massacred the heavens, and whole generations of students at Fremont State came to believe that the North Star lay in Ursula Minor and that the proper names of Betelgeuse and Zubeneschamali were Beetle Juice and Reuben Smiley.

  But occasionally moments of unexpected emotion took possession of the classroom, and then the laughing students remembered that they were studying with a real astronaut. One day a farm boy from downstate who had studied the heavens the way Pope had done as a boy and had even built his own telescope, polishing the glass like Galileo, said, “Professor Pope, my Norton Star Atlas doesn’t show three of the stars you have on your list. Navi, Regor and Dnoces.”

  Suddenly Pope choked. He twice tried to speak but could not, and the students were powerless even to guess what was the matter, but then he controlled himself. “At dusk on 27 January 1967 we were giving our first manned Apollo a shakedown. Something went wrong, and Grissom, White and Chaffee burned to death. There were three spaces in the heavens where navigational stars were needed but had not yet been named, so we called them Navi after Ivan Grissom, Regor after Roger Chaffee, and you’d never guess how we honored Ed White. He was Edward Higgins White II, so we reversed the Second, and I think that name’s the best of all.” He stopped to let the students check the positions of these three important stars, and identify their constellations: Navi in Cassiopeia, Dnoces at the far tip of Ursa Major, and Regor to the south in Vela.

  Then he said, “As long as Americans venture into outer space, they’ll be guided by the spirits of Grissom, White and Chaffee.”

  One morning a girl student said, “There’s always been a lot of speculation about the last words of Colonel Claggett on your Apollo 18 mission. The real text has never been divulged, so far as I can find out. What did he say?”

  “It was a garble,” Pope evaded. “You know, that tremendous flood of radiation. It wiped out transmission to Earth.”

  “But you must have heard the words. You weren’t on Earth. You were right there.”

  [727] Pope considered this for some moments. He had always deemed Claggett’s message, which he had heard so clearly, to be a privileged communication, and on this morning he persisted in that opinion, refusing to answer the girl’s question, but that night, as he worked in the planetarium arranging the stars he would show the next day to explain the motion of the planets, it occurred to him that nothing was served by keeping Claggett’s last words to himself. They represented his dead companion, so next morning at the close of class he answered the girl: “I’ve never revealed what it was Randy said when he knew that he was about to crash his module and die on the Moon, but I see no good reason to keep the secret any longer. I shall tell you merely his words, and let you unravel their significance. What he said was, ‘Blessed Saint Leibowitz, keep ‘em dreamin’ down there.’ ” And he walked from the lecture hall.

  The students scoured the campus trying to find clues to this remarkable sentence; the words blessed, saint and Leibowitz formed such a contradictory conjunction that they could make nothing of them, but one freshman boy had a buddy addicted to science fiction, the way Claggett had been, and this one solved the mystery in a moment. Next day the freshman raised his hand to inform Pope that he had the answer, and when Pope bent over his desk, the lad whispered, “Walter Miller.” Returning to the front of the room, Pope said:

  “Many believe, as Claggett did, that the best science-fiction novel ever written is a strange book by a man named Walter Miller. He called it A Canticle for Leibowitz. It takes place around A.D. 3175. The world has been shot to blazes by nuclear warfare, and in a great revulsion against science, like the one we’re witnessing today, all libraries, laboratories and research materials have been destroyed. Scientists have been torn apart ... Actually, people live in caves, with no electricity, no medicine, no books.

  “North America has disintegrated into warring feudal states and life is unutterably bleak, but in one corner of New Mexico a group of dedicated monks, let’s call them, has secretly kept alive the tradition [728] of an all-wise scientist who had once lived in that area, a saintly man named Leibowitz. The most precious document in this sequestered civilization? A revered scrap of paper from Leibowitz’s laboratory. Unquestionably authentic, it has not yet been decoded. It reads:

  Pound pastrami

  Can kraut

  Six bagels

  Bring home
for Emma.

  “From that shred of cryptic paper the culture of the entire western part of the United States will be recreated. I commend Leibowitz to you. Randy Claggett placed us in his hands when he died, and I’m sure the Blessed Saint would not be surprised to find that the state of Fremont had voted to outlaw all books dealing with evolution and geology, because that’s what happened in exactly this part of America in his lifetime. Say A.D. 2010.”

  In February 1981 the pressure on Stanley Mott, as spokesman for the Space Shuttle, became intense, because each trivial delay, unavoidable in an operation of this complexity and magnitude, became an occasion for reporters to bewail anew the failure of the entire concept. Thousands of sarcastic words were written about the tiles, and one enterprising woman reporter burrowed through the entire history of NASA, dredging up every instance of failure and asking in bold headlines, HAS NASA LOST ITS TOUCH? Doom and catastrophe reigned, and when two men were actually killed because they ventured into the wrong chamber at the wrong time to breathe pure nitrogen, Mott himself began to wonder if this great enterprise might be snake-bit, but he kept his apprehensions to himself.