Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Lee, for once in his life, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

  “Can I tell my people?”

  Muldoon checked his watch, an astronaut’s heavy Rolex. “We can’t make a public announcement until the stock markets on the West Coast close… Well, what the hell.”

  He allowed Lee to make two phone calls.

  Lee used the phone in Muldoon’s office. He thought of calling Jennine.

  He called Art Cane.

  And then he called Gene Tyson, at Hughes, and he took a lot of pleasure in commiserating with him.

  Muldoon took Lee out that night, for a meal and a good few cold ones. Lee got thoroughly oiled and had a hell of a time.

  But by 5 A.M. he was up, watching the early-morning news on the TV, and packing his overnight bag.

  He caught a glance of himself in the mirror on the wall of his motel room. “By God,” he said aloud. “I’m going to build a spacecraft to take three Americans to Mars.”

  Then the TV news item broke into his awareness.

  A Saturn VB had blown up. There was an image of a white cloud, tinged with orange, with Solid Rocket Boosters veering crazily out of it, trailing smoke.

  The commentators said the accident would set the Ares program back years.

  My God. Lee knotted his tie, his fingers frantic, fumbling, and hurried from the room. New York Times, Tuesday, December 15, 1981

  …Today the last remains of the tragic Apollo-N space mission have been buried, in an underground storage facility at NASA’s Cape Kennedy launch site in Florida.

  I spoke to Aaron Raab at the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center about the problems involved. Raab was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1946. He joined NASA in July 1967, just a few months after another tragedy, the Apollo 1 pad fire which claimed the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Apollo-N disaster, Raab shouldered the heavy burden of “Debris Manager.”

  After being off-loaded from its recovery vessel at Port Canaveral, the Apollo-N Command Module — the 11,000-pound capsule which returned NASA astronauts Dana, Jones, and Priest to Earth — was painstakingly disassembled and laid out for investigation purposes in temporary storage areas by a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team. Under Raab’s supervision, and under the watchful eye of the investigating commission appointed by President Reagan, the components of the Command Module were arranged in their original configuration relative to one another, to assist the investigators. The components remained in this “footprint” for almost a full year, because once the investigations were over and the reports written, NASA got down to its own internal engineering evaluation and data retrieval.

  Surprisingly little equipment was used to move the components about, including a light crane, a forklift, and two flatbed trucks.

  Because the Command Module had been recovered from the saltwater ocean, some of it required corrosion-proofing to preserve it. In addition, special measures were taken to protect Apollo-N’s voice recorders. Soon after recovery the recorders had been sent to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for restoration by IBM and analysis by a team led by woman astronaut Natalie York.

  The Command Module’s final resting place is perhaps bizarre, but practical. The spacecraft now lies deep underground in a disused Minuteman missile silo complex in a quiet corner of Cape Canaveral. The chosen site consists of one silo (Complex 31) and four vaultlike underground equipment rooms.

  The operation to prepare the silo as a final resting place was a tricky one. The silo complex had deteriorated badly after some ten years of neglect. The equipment rooms still housed a considerable amount of electronic equipment associated with missile operations, which Raab’s team had to remove before the Apollo-N debris could be transported in. Other modifications were made to transform the underground equipment rooms, which were in a bad state of repair, into permanent storage vaults. Although there was to be no environmental control, the underground facilities had to be made at least watertight; it turned out that back in the late 1960s a burst pipe had immersed the floor of Complex 31 under several feet of water, and so the water lines were all capped off before the Apollo-N debris was moved in.

  There was extensive photo-documentation by NASA cameramen, and the whole operation was conducted under a tight security cordon, with round-the-clock surveillance to deter morbid souvenir hunters.

  “We got the components in the vault in a very organized manner,” Aaron Raab told me. “We compartmentalized the components according to function and storage requirements. Primarily, we put the larger components in first, and anything we felt would be of any significance in the future was left in an accessible area. It was all logged in by our quality control personnel here at the Cape, in official logbooks. These record precisely where each component is stored.”

  It would be a fairly involved operation for anyone to get back into the vault, but future investigators could go in and retrieve components after a few days of clearing work. But, says Raab, there are no plans for the periodic opening up of the vaults to check the condition of the stored wreckage.

  Today, I watched as Aaron Raab personally laid the last few poignant components of the Command Module in position. A huge 10-ton concrete cap was secured with long steel rods and welded down over the underground vault.

  A year after the accident, Apollo-N is at last laid to rest…

  January 1982

  WASHINGTON, DC

  At first Bert Seger had been enthusiastic about his new post in Washington. He was, after all, given the rank of associate administrator, and, as a senior manager in the Office of Manned Spaceflight, he still expected to have a strong hands-on involvement in the manned program. But when he studied the new organization charts, and he saw just how far away from him were the reporting lines of the major players, like Joe Muldoon, he started to realize he’d been had. He’d been handed a sinecure, something to get him decently out of the way during the investigations into Apollo-N.

  He never became comfortable at Headquarters. He had a few assignments, and some pet projects of his own to pursue, and they filled his time, but not his attention. He would find himself sitting alone in his office for hours on end, waiting for the telephone to ring, reading newspapers.

  He took long walks around Washington.

  He found favored benches in the big public gardens and floated through the museums. He liked the serenity, the timelessness of the museums.

  The evenings weren’t any better.

  Fay was still in Houston, with the boys, and Seger would fly back there every Friday. Fay didn’t want to move, because of the boys’ schooling, and Seger accepted that, reluctantly.

  Every Sunday or Monday, when he had to get ready to fly back to DC, Fay prepared him a little bouquet of carnations. Each day he’d take one for his buttonhole, but they’d be pretty faded by the end of the week, and it just wasn’t the same.

  He had too much time to think.

  He kept on going over the events of that flight — in fact, over everything he’d done in all the years that had led up to Apollo-N.

  Was there anything he should have done differently during the flight, anything he’d missed that might have saved Jones, Priest, and Dana? And during the long development, how far was he responsible for the shoddiness, the carelessness which had finally destroyed the nuclear rocket?

  He didn’t come up with any answers. He could, in retrospect, think of a thousand things he might have done differently. But he wasn’t wallowing; he knew that anything is possible with the benefit of hindsight. He’d done the best he could, at every stage of his career.

  But it was no comfort. It happened on my watch.

  In the hall of his rented apartment he had hung a small brass-framed photograph. It showed three space-suited astronauts. To Bert — In Your Hands.

  Seger didn’t go in or out of his apartment without looking at that photo and reading the inscription.

  He found a run-down little C
atholic church, tucked away just a few blocks from Headquarters, and took to spending time in there. He attended Mass three or four times a week. The ancient, gentle ritual took him back to his childhood and comforted him.

  He was struck — shocked, even — by the poverty he saw around him in the neighborhood of the church, just blocks away from NASA Headquarters, here in the capital city of the richest nation on the planet.

  He began to see that he’d been locked away inside NASA for too long, pursuing the organization’s single goal, the Mars landing, with blinkered obsessiveness. Perhaps they all had.

  He remembered how shocked he’d been by the intrusion of those antinuke protesters at the Cape.

  The world out here, beyond JSC, had continued to evolve, and Seger felt as if he was emerging into a new, harsh light, his NASA cocoon crumbling around him.

  He went to the libraries and started going through back issues of newspapers — papers he’d barely scanned when they were printed, save for sports results and NASA coverage. Then, as he stared into grainy microfiche screens, he felt as if he was learning about some phase of ancient history. But this was the world in which he had lived, the story of the country which supported him.

  The United States was falling apart, it seemed to Seger.

  The country was deep in recession. Under Reagan, there was a kind of cheerful, simplistic optimism around. But the divisions in society seemed to Seger to be growing wider than ever. Two Americas were emerging: there was a grotesque, materialistic money-chase among the already affluent, and among the poor — particularly the nonwhites, in the inner cities — there was a tailspin of drugs, crime, decaying housing projects, and a failing educational system.

  And meanwhile, Seger learned, in the middle of the recession, Reagan was vastly increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Nuclear weapons were a key part of that buildup. Next year, cruise missiles would be deployed in Western Europe, in the face of much protest from those countries. There’d been more protest at home, too, he read.

  People were growing scared again. A DoD official had talked about how backyard shelters would save them all, when the bomb dropped. If there are enough shovels going around, everybody’s going to make it.

  Seger read back as far as Three Mile Island. The similarities — administrative and technical — between that disaster and the Apollo-N incident chilled him.

  The general press coverage of NASA, once he looked on that with his new perspective, startled him, too. He saw skepticism, anger, contempt, resentment, on the part of the people outside looking in. He remembered how Eisenhower had cautioned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex — against an expanded space program, in fact — because technocracy was foreign to the individualistic American spirit, and grafting it onto the nation was going to do a lot of harm. Well, Kennedy had accepted that risk. And it seemed to Seger that the country was paying the price.

  The space program, he saw now, was a prime symptom of all this. What use was any of it? The much-lauded spin-offs were minimal and probably would have come about anyhow, if the need was there. NASA’s continuing obsession with manned flight had distorted the whole organization, the direction of other programs. Space initiatives which might have done some good down on Earth — science projects, Earth resources studies — had all been subordinated to the operational needs of the manned missions. An unmanned mission wouldn’t even be approved if it didn’t support the manned effort more or less directly — or worse, if it indicated that humans might not be necessary in space…

  NASA had lobbied to go to Mars, he began to see, in order to justify itself, to keep its huge teams together, after the great lunar effort wound down.

  Of course, releasing NASA’s funds to other, Earthbound projects would have been a token gesture. The money would have seeped away, Seger was sure, with no tangible benefit. But that wasn’t the point. The space program was like a huge, spindly, etiolated plant, pushing all its energy obsessively into one sickly Mars red bloom, while the society in which its roots were anchored was steadily disintegrating.

  It just wasn’t appropriate. Any more than had been the overambitious civilian nuclear program, the weapons buildup…

  To Seger, the Mars mission came to seem almost blasphemous.

  A new clarity entered his thoughts as he shaped these ideas. A new determination.

  Of course he knew that he was still reacting to Apollo-N. His thoughts would be structured by that defining incident for the rest of his life. Perhaps, in fact, he was still in some mild form of shock. It didn’t matter. Truth remained truth, no matter what the form of the revelation, and he felt he was on his own road to Damascus, seeing the space program from the outside, in its true perspective, for the first time in his working life.

  He found great comfort in his new perception.

  The next time he attended Mass, he asked the priest if he could give a sermon. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 313/11:33:22

  313/11:33:22 CDR …For my part, I want to use the opportunity of this telecast to register our awareness of the debt we owe to all those who came before us. This flight has come out of the efforts, first, of people from history, of scientists across the world, who have brought us to the point where we can meet the challenge even of a deep space trek like this across the Solar System. Next, the American people, who have expressed their will to see this great exploration adventure continue. Next, four administrations and their Congresses for having the courage to implement that will. After the Moon landings I think it’s true to say that America came close to turning its back on spaceflight, and it took political courage and vision to bring us to where we are, today. And then we come to the Agency and industry teams that built the spacecraft: the Saturn boosters, the Mission Module, the Apollo, and the MEM. This trip of ours to Mars may look to you simple or easy. I’d like to assure you that that has not been the case. The Saturn VB booster system which put us into orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked perfectly. This switch which I have in my hand now, if you can see that, has over three hundred counterparts in this control rack alone, and there are many more in the Command Module and the MEM. In addition to that, there are myriads of circuit breakers, levers, rods, and other associated controls. The MS-II, the big rocket stage on the back end of our Ares cluster, has performed flawlessly so far; and it must do so again, or we cannot return to the Earth… We have always had confidence that all this equipment will work and work properly, and we continue to have confidence that it will do so for the remainder of this flight. All this is possible only through the endeavors of a number of people. First, the American men and women who put these pieces of machinery together at the factory. Second, the test teams, with their painstaking work during the assembly and retest after assembly. Third, the astronauts who flew before us to assemble the Ares components in Earth orbit. Finally, the people at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, in management, in mission planning and flight control, and in crew training. This operation is somewhat like a TV news show; all you see on screen is the three of us, but behind the scenery are thousands of others — hundreds of thousands. And every damn one of them did his or her job to the utmost.

  313/11:35:10 MMP [INAUDIBLE]

  313/11:35:12 CDR And every one of them did his or her job to the utmost. To those people, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight. And finally we have to remember those crew, those astronauts, who have lost their lives in the course of our space program. Here I want to remember both Russians and Americans. I want to tell you that I begrudge every one of those lives lost, and no such price is worth paying. But by their sacrifice, those brave men and women have made today, this mission, possible. God bless you. And now Ralph is going to show you something, the marker we’re intending to leave on the surface of Mars. Ralph?

  313/11:35:45 MMP I have it. I’ll hold it up to the camera. I hope you can see that. Maybe if I turn it a l
ittle. For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll describe the marker. The marker is a disk of diamond, a little like a coin, about an inch across and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. It is a single-crystal diamond. An excimer laser was used to cut a message into the diamond, creating a layer of graphite in there, with a layer of diamond deposited on the top. The marker has been manufactured of diamond because that is the most durable material we know; the marker could survive for millions of years, long after our MEM and our other artifacts have been destroyed. As you know this is the only Mars flight planned for the foreseeable future. But the marker is like a time capsule, to people who may follow us to Mars; and it is, perhaps, a message to future life on Mars, to sentient beings who may emerge there some day. The marker is a little like a microfiche, with a lot of information stored on it, mostly too small for me to make out. But we have here greetings from all the nations of the Earth, and a map of the Solar System as it exists today, and information about the biological composition of human beings. And, embedded in the diamond, we have small samples of Earth rock, and of Moon rock, and human tissue. And, also on here, there is a list of all four hundred thousand Americans who have contributed to Project Ares. We think this is a fitting thing to leave there, on Mars, as a memorial of our mission.

  313/11:37:07 CDR Okay. Natalie, I believe you’re going to tell the folks about our call signs for the rest of this mission.

  313/11:37:11 MSP Thank you. I know that sometimes our space-age jargon confuses the hell out of people.

  313/11:37:15 CDR Hot mike.

  313/11:37:17 MSP Confuses people. And it sure confuses me. For instance, our space travelers’ “calendar.” We count our days from the moment we left the ground, aboard our Saturn VB booster, from the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center. So, to us, today is MET 313 days — that’s three hundred and thirteen days of Mission Elapsed Time, more than three hundred days since we left Earth. While to you, it is a plain old Tuesday, January 28, 1986. And this business of the call signs is another problem. Why is it that spacecraft sometimes have call signs — individual names, like Apollo 11’s Eagle and Columbia — and at other times Houston will refer to us as just, say, “Ares”? The answer is that we need to use call signs when there is more than one separate spacecraft involved in a flight, and they need to be distinguished in our radio conversations. And that’s going to be true on this flight, when we get to Mars in a couple of months’ time, and we land on the surface in our MEM. Unlike the Apollo missions to the Moon, we decided not to choose the names for our separate craft until now, until after the launch, as we haven’t needed them. As a crew we thought we’d prefer to spend some of the long transfer time to Mars on thinking about that.