It was quite a thought.
Priest was talking about the dust storm. “It covered the whole damn planet, Natalie. When we arrived we couldn’t see a thing. They did some measurements at the limb of the planet, and found the dust reaching an altitude of fifty miles. It seems impossible, but it’s true. Anyhow, the storm did us one favor.”
“How’s that?”
“All of a sudden, funnily enough, everybody got very excited about looking at the moons. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?”
“No thanks, Ben.”
He led her through more corridors, to a smaller laboratory. More shirtsleeves, working at terminals and screens.
“Image Processing,” Priest said. He took her to an unoccupied monitor, and they sat on rickety fold-up chairs. He began tapping at the keypad. “They got the first reasonably clear image of Phobos on revolution thirty-one — just last night. I stayed up until the small hours watching them process the data…” An image began to build up on the video monitor, line by line, working from top to bottom. “Mariner records its pictures on magnetic tape, and sends them back to Earth in pretty much the way a newsprint wire photo is transmitted. This is exactly how the first image emerged, for the team last night.”
She smiled. “What’s this, Ben? Why not just show me the finished picture? More NASA showmanship?”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’re too cynical. Or would be, if I thought you meant it.”
Impulsively she touched his hand. “I’m sorry, Ben.” His skin was warm and leathery.
He grinned at her easily.
Today she was finding Ben, with his intelligence and enthusiasm for the wonderful Mars project, unreasonably attractive. Damn it. I’m not supposed to feel like this.
She concentrated on the pictures.
The upper few lines of the image had been black — just empty space. But then she saw some detail, a curve of gray and white, building up line by line. At first she thought she was seeing the limb of a sphere, but the shape soon looked much too irregular for that.
Phobos turned out to be a rough ellipse, half in shadow, with a battered, irregular edge. It looked much more like York’s preconception of an asteroid than any moon. There were craters everywhere, huge and ancient, some so deep that the impacts that caused them must have come close to splitting the battered little moon in half.
“Natalie, this is more or less the face of Phobos, about half the size of our full Moon, that you would see if you were standing on Mars right now.”
Phobos looked like a diseased potato. Priest was staring at the picture, and its gray and black reflected in his eyes. “This is history, Natalie. Think about it: mine were among the first human eyes ever to see Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. I wanted to show you this, kind of share it with you, the way I saw it.”
She was moved to touch him again, but she resisted the impulse. “Show me Mars, Ben.”
“Sure.”
After a few more minutes Priest had retrieved images of the surface of the planet itself. But the dust storm was still continuing. There was only one place away from the poles where any detail was visible: an area called Tharsis, close to the Martian equator. Here the pictures showed four dark, irregular spots, roughly circular, three in a line running at an angle to the equator, and the fourth a little way away to the west.
She asked, “What the hell can these be?”
“Who knows? I guess we’ll figure it out when the storm clears. The lab staffers are calling them ‘Carl’s Marks.’ After Sagan, see—”
The shapes in the images intrigued her; they were familiar, somehow. If only she could see just a little more… “You say this region’s called Tharsis. Do we know anything else about it?”
“Actually, yes. You’re the geologist, Natalie. You ought to know.”
“Just tell me, asshole.”
“There have been radar studies of Mars since the mid-sixties. This Tharsis region — which is just a bright splotch seen from Earth — looks as if it’s the highest plateau on the planet.”
“Really? How high?”
He shrugged. “Ten or twenty miles above the mean datum. We can’t say for sure. Mean datum — you understand there’s no ocean on Mars, so no convenient sea level to—”
“You must have some better-resolution images than these. It’s the only visible spot on the planet, for Christ’s sake. Somebody must have pointed the cameras again.”
Priest began to work the keyboard. He found a couple of images which showed her some more detail. She stared at the screen, pressing close to the glass.
“You’re telling me these features are stable? That they aren’t, uh, whirlwinds in the dust storm or somesuch?”
“No way. They’ve lasted since Mariner got to Mars, a couple of weeks ago. We’re undoubtedly looking at some kind of surface feature, here.”
She could see circular markings within each spot. And there was some kind of scalloping. They almost look like volcanic caldera. The mouths of volcanoes.
But why should these features, of all of Mars, be showing up at all? Because they’re in Tharsis. And Tharsis is the highest region on Mars. And why these particular features? Because they are the highest points in Tharsis — therefore the highest points on the planet…
“My God,” she whispered.
“Natalie? What is it?”
Those spots had to be volcanoes, sitting on top of some kind of vast shield system. Big enough to dwarf anything on Earth. Everest was only five miles high; those babies must be fifteen miles at least. So high they were poking above the dust storms; so high they were above the bulk of the atmosphere itself.
“Natalie? Are you okay?”
York couldn’t believe her eyes. She had Priest call up image after image.
At least, she reflected later, the mystery of the Martian geology had taken her mind off Priest.
Saturday, December 11, 1971
NASA HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC
After Fred Michaels hung up, Tim Josephson sat in his office, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
The decision was made.
He supposed he ought to be feeling triumph. Exultation. We’ve got what we wanted, by God. Another huge boondoggle, a program that ought to keep thousands of NASA employees gainfully employed for a decade or more.
But the truth was, he felt too beat-up to care.
He was having a little trouble focusing his eyes. He’d been chained to his desk and phone all day, working in support of Fred Michaels’s machinations. And there were still a hundred and one things to be finished up. But, he told himself, there was nothing that wouldn’t keep until the next day.
So he took his shoes off and got his feet up on his desk, and he started dictating into a pocket tape recorder.
The last few months had given Josephson, working as a close aide of Fred Michaels, a startling insight into the way major national decisions were made: at the highest level in the land, with at stake national prestige, tens of billions of dollars spread across many years, and hundreds of high-profile careers in politics, industry, the military. Someday he was going to write a book about all of it. Management in the Space Age, maybe.
The decision about America’s future in space had turned out to be extraordinarily painful.
It had been clear to Josephson from the beginning that Nixon wanted to spend as little as possible on space.
The fact was, Nixon — belying his image — had brought a pretty liberal domestic agenda to the White House; in the midst of a debilitating war, he wanted to free up money to pay for expanded social entitlement programs, and wage and price controls.
Space was one place that money could come from. But space was a tough lobby to fight.
So, soon after coming into office, Nixon had allowed Congress to reorganize the standing space committees out of existence, so that space was the purview of the Senate Commerce and House Science and Technology subcommittees. Losing its special interface to Congress, NASA wa
s in danger of being emasculated, losing its heroic status, becoming just another spending department fighting for funds. To most people involved in the space program, even within NASA, such changes were all but invisible; but to an insider like Josephson — or Michaels — they were dramatic, a potent signifier of Nixon’s real determination to down-grade the profile of space.
But then the White House had come up against the aerospace industry.
Aerospace was ailing, as ever. In fact technological progress was making life even tougher. New systems were either not deployed at all or had short production runs: if it works, it’s obsolete Aerospace firms had to bet the farm every time they accepted a contract.
But obviously the government needed a healthy aerospace industry. So ways had to be found to feed the industry in slack times: to spread wealth, and to subsidize research. The civilian space program was perfect for that purpose. It always had been.
So, from the start of 1971, Fred Michaels had started to put it about that the aerospace industry might not be able to survive another year of diminished space work; he spoke particularly to congressmen from states like California, Texas, and Florida, where aerospace depression was an acute electoral issue. And he quietly encouraged the contractors contributing to the various program studies to talk up their estimates of the employment the various options would stimulate. It was all designed to keep the pressure on the White House. Nineteen seventy-two is an election year. We need a space program to keep the aerospace guys in work… But what’s that program going to he?
Josephson was mildly shocked at how quickly the scientific and exploratory aspects of spaceflight were discarded as factors in shaping the new program. Nobody with any clout cared about going to Mars, or anywhere else, for the science. And nobody argued — he was more surprised to observe — on the basis of the benefits of space spin-offs. After all, if you wanted the spin-offs, why go into space at all? Why not turn the R D money and NASA’s fabled management skills directly to other, more worthy, programs?
Those were hard questions to answer. So Michaels, bluntly, avoided them.
In public, Michaels played up space as an adventure — something a nation like the U.S. ought to be able to afford, damn it. Astronauts from the heroic days, including Joe Muldoon, were wheeled out to serve as living reminders of good moments gone by. After Michaels’s skillful PR hoopla, Mars came to seem a little more acceptable. There was a snowball effect, and some support for the option started to appear on the Hill.
And, slowly, the opinion polls showed public opposition to a Mars option dropping.
But NASA’s budget was still far too high. In July, members of Congress had moved twice to delete manned spaceflight altogether from the FY1972 budget.
It was a dangerous moment in history, and the hard bargaining continued.
What can we drop?
At one point Josephson had believed Nixon was coming close to approving the Space Shuttle system — just that one item, out of all the options his own task group had presented. At least the goal of the Shuttle was to do with reducing costs, and the Shuttle would actually have been the favored option of the aerospace lobby because of all the new development it would have entailed.
But the Shuttle program had quickly become a mess. It was obvious, Josephson thought, that the final, low-cost Shuttle design was a bastardized compromise, put together by committee to satisfy conflicting interests. And Michaels wasn’t above drafting his predecessor, Paine — a great lover of the Mars option whom Michaels had replaced in September — to point out the Shuttle’s strong military flavor. It was no accident that the low, hundred-mile orbits which were all the Space Shuttle was capable of, and its wide-ranging flyback capabilities, were ideally suited to Air Force missions.
The Space Shuttle would be cute technology, with nowhere to go except low-Earth-orbit reconnaissance missions. In an era in which detente was becoming the fashion, the military taint of the Shuttle was unpalatable. And besides, Kennedy and others never ceased to remind the public, there was nothing heroic about it.
So Josephson had watched, not unhappily, as the Shuttle quietly faded from Nixon’s thinking. The next generation of launch vehicles for manned flight, instead, would probably be a series of upgraded Saturns.
It looked as if there would be no elaborate space station modules, either, as the Space Task Group had proposed; just an extended series of Skylabs, improvised from Saturn fuel tanks. The engineers inside NASA screamed like hell, especially Mueller and his space station lobby. But it all brought the cost profile closer to something the White House might be able to endorse.
Of course, contained in the final program there would be trade-offs. Rockwell had been a hot favorite as lead contractor for the canned Shuttle. And it looked as if its big rival, Boeing, was going to get the largest piece of the new space booster pie, because Boeing, manufacturer of the huge Saturn S-IC first stage, was going to be lead contractor in the new enhanced Saturn project. Boeing had all sorts of ideas for reducing the costs of the Saturn V system, for instance by adding strap-on reusable rockets to it, and even making the S-IC itself recoverable, including wings, parachutes, hydrogen-filled balloons, drag brakes, paragliders, and rotary systems of spinning parachutes.
So Rockwell — manufacturer of Apollo — looked, to everyone’s surprise, like being left with very little. It was offered a consolation: it would be allowed to proceed with a program to turn the S-II, its hydrogen-fueled Saturn second stage, into a heavyweight interplanetary injection engine. But that, of course, was the job that NERVA would perform, so strictly speaking the S-II program was redundant before it started, and questions were already being asked about its requirement and viability.
Still, Josephson thought wryly, Rockwell was bound to pick up other compensations along the way. Already it was the hot favorite for the one big new start-up spacecraft program to emerge from today’s decision, even before it had been announced…
Meanwhile the military had been bought off, to Josephson’s way of thinking, with a promise of a presence on the new long-duration Skylabs, a restoration of their old Manned Orbital Laboratory mission objectives.
The new space program, then, was going to be a balance of forces, a compromise among the warring factions lobbying the White House and Capitol Hill. Thus, Josephson thought, as it always was.
But it wouldn’t have come together without Michaels’s string-pulling and favor-calling, exploiting the web of political alliances he’d built up over the years. A less astute Administrator — Thomas Paine, for instance — wouldn’t have had a prayer of delivering it. And yet Josephson knew that Michaels’s work was only just beginning. Michaels had worked to obtain the initial commitment to a new program; the challenge would be to keep that commitment in the long, wearying years ahead.
Fred Michaels had known Nixon all the way back to the Sputnik days, when he’d been Eisenhower’s veep. Michaels believed that Nixon was a man who grasped the symbolism of the space age, right from the beginning. “Politics is frankly more important than science,” Michaels had told Josephson, and Josephson repeated it into his tape recorder. “The real motive for space is prestige. Nixon understands that. He’s the right clay to be shaped. I tell you, Tim; I’m not so surprised at the way all this has turned out. All he needed was the right argument…”
Maybe, Josephson thought. But Nixon was also pragmatic, highly intelligent, a man who saw space as fairly low on his priority list.
He might have chosen to shut down the manned program altogether.
And yet, and yet…
And yet there was dear old Jack Kennedy, speaking like a ghost from his study in New England, quietly telling Americans that they were better than their pessimistic visions of themselves: that they had, after all, succeeded in landing men on the Moon, and in the full view of the world; that they should not pause, but should go on, endlessly reinventing themselves in the light of the fiery dream that was space travel, a dream of which Kennedy had become the living embo
diment…
It had come to a head, at last, today. Michaels had been asked to a meeting with Agronski, other Presidential aides, and representatives of the Office of Management and Budget.
Agronski, Michaels told Josephson, had opened the meeting briskly. “You’re going to get your Mars boondoggle, Fred. Against my better judgment.”
“The President’s approving the program.”
“Yes.” Agronski shuffled papers. “There are still some decisions to be made about size and cost…”
Michaels grunted. “What decided him?”
“A number of factors. The point that we can’t afford to forgo manned spaceflight altogether, for our prestige at home and abroad.” He sounded rueful. “We’re stuck with you, Fred. That the Mars mission is the only option we have that is meaningful and could be accomplished on a modest budget. That we were only thinking of cutting NASA anyway because we could. That not starting the program would be damaging to the aerospace industry…”
Michaels had understood, and Josephson wasn’t surprised. Kennedy’s lobbying, and his own machinations, had swung public opinion just enough. And 1972 was going to be an election year; unemployment lines in states heavily dependent on aerospace — California, Texas, Florida — wouldn’t look good for Nixon. But we were damn lucky to find an ally in Cap Weinberger. Without Cap’s lobbying inside the administration, Josephson knew, the manned program could have been lost.
The meeting had started haggling over details, the wording of a Presidential announcement. But the decision was made.
Mars.
Josephson, through his weariness, felt a deep satisfaction growing inside him. It was like the feeling of having enjoyed a fine meal, brandy and cigars.
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