Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Grant said, ‘With our astronauts we get three pages in Life every week, three columns in the Los Angeles Times, three pages around the world. Never forget, you scientists, what a colossal beating our nation took when Yuri Gagarin was parading country to country proving that Communism was superior to democracy. I want John Glenn and Virgil Grissom to be doing the parading, and on the happy day we land one of our men on the Moon, we back Russia right off the map. It’s as simple as that.’

  To Stanley Mott, ideas were the noblest manifestations of mankind, and he felt that in this room his ideas were not being accorded the dignity they deserved. He had spent his lifetime wrestling with these majestic concepts and responsibilities, and he was not disposed to allow two senators who had entered the field only recently, or a writer who had been handed an assignment, ‘Astronauts & Space,’ to dislodge him peremptorily from his reasoned positions, and he was about to speak rather forcefully when Mrs. Pope caught the set of his jaw and said brightly, ‘Well, I think that winds this up.’

  But the two senators had detected Mott’s displeasure, and after Mrs. Pope had led Kolff back to the waiting room, Mike Glancey put his arm about Mott’s shoulder and said, ‘The difference between a politician like me and a scientist like you is that to hold my job I have to get elected … every six years. You only have to be appointed … once. And what you learn from elections is that man is the measure of all things. If there’s not a man in the picture, it ain’t a picture.’

  ‘He’s right, Stanley,’ Senator Grant said. ‘I had enough engineering in the Navy to know you’re right in your basic argument. Of course we could proceed without the astronauts. But it would be terribly wrong to try.’

  ‘The taxpayer, the man who foots the bill, would walk away from our program. Your most creative dreams would be dead.’

  After they had talked this way for some time, Glancey told a story about the first day of his first election campaign. ‘Stanley, I was the brightest kid in Red River. And I’d studied all the proposed legislation to make myself even brighter. But when I went out to make my speech in an Italian section, the first question was, “How do you stand on House Bill 21-957?” I’d never heard of it. Had to do with Italian immigration. They didn’t give a damn about all the hot issues—war, taxation, medical care, the new dam—they wanted to know about 21-957, and when I didn’t even know what it was, I lost any claim to their support. I didn’t get fifteen votes in that district.

  ‘Point of the story,’ Glancey said, ‘is that you must listen to the people on whatever terms they care to speak. In space it’s astronauts … Tucker Thompson photographing the anguished wife behind the white picket fence.’

  Mott listened, and the more he considered the phenomenon of the astronauts, the more he was driven to the conclusion that the senators were right and he was wrong. Dieter Kolff’s enthusiasm for the big mechanical rocket had blinded him to the social persuasiveness of the astronauts and their wives. Man was the measure of all things, and although it was correct that machines could perform miracles, they could not enlist the emotional support of the public. Astronauts could, and he left this confrontation committed to the role of human beings in space, for without them as a measure, a criterion for meaning, the program had no viability.

  At the door, Grant asked, ‘What news from Los Angeles?’ and for a moment Mott could not decipher what the senator was talking about. He first assumed that Grant was referring to some member of the study committee who had voted against Earth-orbit rendezvous, and started to fumble for an answer, but then he remembered that Grant had once commissioned him to check out the nefarious Dr. Strabismus, and recalling Dieter’s handsome diploma, he burst into laughter, and said, ‘Haven’t you heard? USA is no longer a research institute. It’s now the University of Space and Aviation.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘And even NASA bought six or eight doctorates for the older NACA hands. To give our outfit a touch of class.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘Not at all. I saw one of the diplomas on Dieter Kolff’s wall three nights ago. It was signed by the chancellor of the university, Dr. Leopold Strabismus, and by his dean of faculty, Marcia Grant, Ph.D.’

  Senator Grant sat heavily on one of the meeting-room chairs. ‘Ph.D.? She didn’t even finish freshman year. And now she’s the dean of faculty.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds, because the university has no faculty.’

  When the last objection to Earth-orbit rendezvous had been disposed of and the special committee was on the verge of recommending that flight to the Moon be conducted according to Von Braun’s solution, a nagging feeling assaulted Mott, and after three days of trying to suppress it, he knew that he must in prudence consult one final time with the men he had worked with longest, those stalwart engineers at Langley who had kept advanced programs alive during the bleak years when they had scarcely a penny, and when he reached there some of his cronies suggested, ‘Why don’t we fly up to Wallops where no phones can reach us and hold an old-time think tank on the beach?’

  They commandeered a NASA plane and flew the short distance to Wallops, where they spent the morning inspecting the striking changes made possible by the acquisition of a nearby naval base. The launching sites had concrete bases now, and there were roads through the spacious, sleeping marshes. There was a commissary instead of cold beans out of a can and a general air of prosperity, but several of the men voiced the doubts which perplexed Mott but which he did not wish to discuss in public: ‘I wonder if they do as much work as we used to, when we slept on the beach and waited for the results of our little rockets?’

  In the afternoon they carried chairs to the beach and sat looking out across the Atlantic, that splendid body of turbulent water into which so many of their experimental rockets had fallen in years past, and after a while one of the men said, ‘They’re making a big fuss about the Mercury men, but none of them has been higher than we sent our rockets from this very beach.’

  ‘Yes, but one of these days they’ll go straight up, two hundred fifty thousand miles, and by damn, there won’t be any atmosphere to measure, up there!’

  ‘What’s it going to be, Mott? Straight up and on, or some kind of rendezvous?’

  ‘We’ve dropped the straight-up bit. That’s dead.’ But when he told them that it looked as if NASA would adopt Von Braun’s plan for Earth orbit, one of the men said, ‘We have this super-brain at Langley, chap named John Houbolt, who’s trying to convince people that it’s folly to use Earth-orbit rendezvous. He claims it should be lunar-orbit rendezvous.’

  ‘You mean, fly the whole works up to the Moon, but don’t land it? Separate it into components and let one of them do the work. Then reunite and come back down?’

  ‘Exactly what he preaches.’

  ‘I don’t think much of lunar-orbit rendezvous,’ Mott said, and he revealed that in his doctorate he had not even considered it. ‘But in our committee, of course, we did have this half-baked presentation, but I can’t recall we spent fifteen minutes on it. There’d be no advantage.’

  And then one of the Langley men said something which caused bells to ring in Mott’s head. ‘You miss the whole point of what Houbolt’s proposing; he claims there would be a weight advantage. As the rocket ascended, you would throw off the parts that were no longer needed. It would get constantly lighter, until at the end you’d have only this little bundle. I think he says you’d leave even the landing machine on the Moon. Or most of it.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Mott asked abruptly, for he could hear the Chance-Vought man speaking that night beside the test field in California: ‘Throw away everything, Mott … even the machinery that brings you home … You have become the spaceship.’

  ‘It’s his plan, not mine. But he has studies showing that under his system, the weight would grow constantly less …’

  Another engineer broke in: ‘Mott, are your people visualizing what Moon vehicles will look like? I mean, are you constantl
y aware that because there is no atmosphere, no nothing to create friction, your machine can have as many protuberances, odd angles, whole faces jutting out … You know, it can look like anything you want it to look like. Don’t get locked in to some streamlined beauty. You streamline an airplane to get it through the solid atmosphere. With no atmosphere, you don’t need streamlining.’

  He suggested that the men move inside. ‘Give me a place to draw.’ When they were settled with their beers, he sketched what he thought a Moon lander might look like, and it was good that he did, for even these practiced engineers were prone to forget that in an ambience without an atmosphere to cause friction or constraint, a vehicle could indeed be built of the flimsiest material and configured in the most bizarre ways. ‘If you want a place for a celestial monkey wrench, you just tack it on the side.’

  But when the engineer was finished with his dramatic presentation of what his spacecraft would look like, a big square bundle with fifteen or twenty projections, Mott returned to what the other man had said on the beach: ‘Tell me about this throwing away of components,’ and the men played a brilliant game of ideas-and-space: ‘You start with this gigantic rocket, the biggest Von Braun can build, and in let’s say fifteen separate steps, you discard item after item. After its utility has been discharged. You wind up in lunar-orbit rendezvous with let’s say six components, and only the light ones. This one breaks away and takes you down to the Moon. You never see it again. This one, this one, this one. In the end you come home in a basket. That’s the advantage of lunar-orbit rendezvous.’

  ‘You know,’ Mott said reflectively, ‘an engineer from Chance-Vought made exactly the same pitch. Throw everything away. What are the facts?’

  Without firm data, but with sophisticated guesses, the excited men began a study. The stars appeared, the Moon rose, the Earth in its incessant revolution caused the heavens to look as if they were turning, and the constellations climbed into position. One of the men dashed off in his car for sandwiches and beer and another for additional scratch paper, and gradually the rough dimensions of the problem were established, and toward three in the morning, when every aspect had been analyzed, Mott came up with these figures:

  At launch, a vehicle which would carry three men to the Moon would weigh about 6,600,000 pounds. In a flight of about 200 hours, everything possible would be jettisoned, maybe nine components in all. At final splashdown, there would be no fuel, no food, no oxygen, no nothing, just three men in a capsule with an ablative front all burned off. Total residual weight, not more than 11,000 pounds.

  ‘Jesus!’ one of the Langley men said. ‘It could be done.’ They spent the next hour checking the data, and at 0400 in the morning, when Altair was climbing above the eastern horizon to inspect the workmen in the porch, Mott agreed: ‘It could be done.’

  He hurried back to Langley to meet with this man Houbolt, who seemed the typical specialist whose ideas were being rebuffed by his superiors. ‘Thanks a million for coming, Mott. The others simply will not listen when I try to tell them that lunar-orbit rendezvous is superior to any other. If the scientific community of this nation will not listen to reason … They won’t even look at the comparisons.’

  Mott talked with him for two days, reviewing in detail his excellent data and diagrams, and came away convinced that whereas Wernher von Braun’s Earth-orbit rendezvous was workable, lunar rendezvous was far superior, and he began quietly to campaign for it. His advocacy had to be muted because he had already been rebuked for having butted in on the astronaut-versus-machine argument, and he was not sure he could survive another head-on collision with the Senate committee; indeed, there was reason to think that it might have been Von Braun who alerted Senator Grant to the earlier subversion being practiced by Mott and Kolff.

  So Mott had to move gingerly, but now he found an unexpected and extremely powerful ally: Lyndon Johnson, in a series of maneuvers so complicated that none could follow, charmed Texas millionaires into ceding land near Houston to a university, which in turn offered it to NASA as a possible site for the nation’s major space center, and with a chain of forced-draft studies which supported the Houston location, Johnson persuaded NASA to locate its Manned Spacecraft Center there and to staff it with most of the brilliant men from Langley. Thus Lyndon Johnson’s Texas center became the arch rival of Von Braun’s Alabama center, and the war was on.

  If Alabama backed EOR, Texas had to back LOR, and Mott found himself automatically allied with the flamboyant Texans against his original German allies in Huntsville. It was a fight which continued for almost a year, with politics, finances, regional pride, fundamental ideas and the great drives of the space age intermingled, and in the end a stalemate existed between Earth orbit and lunar orbit.

  Senators Glancey and Grant became so uneasy with the impasse that they summoned Mott to testify before their committee, but he was so involved with the fighting that he asked to be excused, and they agreed that he should be saved for a rescue operation. Mrs. Pope did schedule hearings at which Alabama pleaded for EOR and Texas for LOR, and when the acrimonious debate ended, without conclusions, she telephoned Mott to appear before her two senators in the morning.

  He drove through the night from an inspection he had been conducting at MIT and appeared before the senators bleary-eyed. Once more their words were harsh: ‘We’ve got to have a decision before the end of the month. See if you can knock heads.’ He asked them which mode of landing they preferred, and Grant snapped: ‘We have no knowledge. All we have are the bills to pay.’

  Mott flew first to Texas, where a colossal space center was rising from marshland, and he had to admit: If you’re going to do it, this is the way. Presto-changeo! Let there be a space center!’ He found the Texans adamant in believing that the Langley alternative was the only practical one: ‘Fly it high, throw everything away, orbit around the Moon and take minimum gear down to the surface, even less when you leave the Moon.’ It could be accomplished with rockets then in existence, or about to be, and it was an elegant solution.

  As a one-time engineer, Mott loved that word elegant, for it implied an entire scale of values: an elegant solution had to be simpler than its adversaries, it had to be easily assembled, it had to be cost-efficient, and it had to be instinctively satisfying to the engineering mind. Lunar rendezvous was elegant.

  But it had to be sold to Alabama, which would be providing the rocketry, and when Mott reached Huntsville he sensed immediately that the Germans felt he was about to betray them. He had mournful meetings with Von Braun and Kolff and long-drawn-out sessions with the lesser engineers, who tried unsuccessfully to drive him into corners. When he talked with Kolff he found no concession whatever; a year ago the square-faced little man had placed his entire career and reputation on the line in favor of the Jules Verne Approach, and when his beloved big rockets were shot down, he transferred his loyalty to Von Braun, defending his leader’s EOR. Now he was being heckled to change again, and this he refused to do.

  He asked Mott to dine with him on Monte Sano, and again Stanley met with Liesl and Magnus, who was preparing to play Telemann’s Concerto in D for Trumpet with an Alabama-Tennessee orchestra. ‘The solo part, you understand,’ Mrs. Kolff said. ‘Five cities. He will travel in a bus and see places Dieter and I have never seen.’

  ‘He’s very young for such an assignment,’ Mott said.

  ‘He’s been playing since he was four,’ Dieter said. ‘A great tribute to America. You gave him the instrument, and the instruction.’ After supper the parents persuaded their son to play the cadenza from the first movement of the concerto, and the stocky lad stood with his feet slightly apart, his head high, and played the limpid, rippling music, displaying his skill at triple-tonguing and sustaining a long series of sweet, rounded notes. When he finished, he bowed and went upstairs to study.

  But the Kolffs had not invited Mott to hear their son play; they wanted to talk with him about the great decisions soon to be made, and to his surprise Liesel join
ed him and Dieter when the chairs were placed on the porch so that the stars of summer could be seen. She said nothing, but she did listen intently.

  KOLFF: I must talk frankly with you, Stanley.

  MOTT: Not about manned flights. That’s settled.

  KOLFF: Agreed. I know when my team has lost.

  MOTT: And not about the Moon as target. We’re going there, and nothing can stop us.

  KOLFF: Agreed. I tried to talk sense with you and failed.

  MOTT: (with slight impatience): So what is it?

  KOLFF: A problem with the most serious repercussions. (He spoke alternately in German and English, using simple words in the latter language, complex ones in the former, but he betrayed no preference, switching from one to the other in a lively flow of ideas.)

  MOTT: Our decisions are nearly final. There can’t be much—

  KOLFF: But there is, and this time you must listen, Stanley. I beg you, I pray you not to commit NASA to lunar-orbit rendezvous.

  MOTT: You astonish me. Lunar orbit’s a marvelous solution.

  KOLFF: Yes, but to a problem not worth solving.

  MOTT: It’ll land us on the Moon. And get us off.

  KOLFF: It’s a one-time spectacular. It’s a brilliant accomplishment with no constructive follow-on.

  MOTT: With this technique we can go anywhere.

  KOLFF: No, no, Stanley! It will carry you only to the Moon. And then its utility is dead … vanished … a costly dream wasted and down the drain.

  MOTT (soberly): What do you see as the error, Dieter?

  KOLFF: Von Braun’s solution of Earth-orbit rendezvous is infinitely superior because it gets you to the Moon almost as efficiently, but in addition, it erects a platform from which all the universe can be explored later on. Will we want a space station in permanent orbit? We can do it from Earth rendezvous a hundred miles up, maybe three hundred, no more. Do we want to explore Mars and Venus? We’ll start from our space platform in Earth rendezvous. Mine the asteroids? Put great telescopes in space? Establish settlements on the Moon? All these things can be done if we start with a solid space platform constructed in Earth orbit. Your way we can do none of them.