Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  Crippen said, ‘Is that music I hear in the background?’

  ‘No,’ Stone said. ‘Ralph is singing.’

  Saturday, August 7, 1971

  Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston

  Bert Seger had some paperwork to finish up before he got to go home today. But when news of the splashdown came in he walked out of his office, into the Control Center’s high corridor. He pulled a cigar out of the breast pocket of his jacket, his hand brushing the pink carnation that his wife had placed there for him, as always.

  After a twelve-day flight, Apollo 14 had splashed down in the Pacific, four miles from the carrier Okinawa. NASA was going to be on a high for a while, Seger realized. Scott and Irwin had spent nineteen hours outside the LM, compared to under three hours for Armstrong and Muldoon, and they had traversed seventeen miles around the terrain at the base of a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain. The flight controllers and astronauts had become pretty good at coordinating with the scientists in the back rooms about where and how they should proceed. Almost every one of the J-class mission’s innovations – the upgraded LM, the Rover, the orbiting Service Module’s instrument pallet – had worked without a hitch.

  14 had been the biggest success since the first landing: even skeptics among the scientists were applauding the mission.

  But now it was done.

  Seger’s footsteps echoed in the quiet. It was just two years since Apollo 11, he thought, and yet the first age of lunar exploration was already over. Damn it, Seger thought. We just got good at this stuff, and now we have to stop.

  He stopped at the door of the MOCR, Mission Control, and stepped in. The MOCR was deserted; everybody had already left for the splashdown party, some almighty gumbo affair the Mission Evaluation guys were holding over in Building 45.

  He climbed the steps to the Flight Director’s console: the heart of a mission, even more so than the couch of the spacecraft commander himself. The big twenty-by-ten-feet screen at the front of the room was black, cold. The controllers’ consoles were littered with books, logs, checklists, headsets, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and half-smoked cigars. Some of the controllers had left behind the little Stars and Stripes they’d waved when the spacecraft splashed down.

  Maybe, he thought, some day these consoles would be full of data streaming in from a manned spacecraft in orbit around Mars.

  Standing here, thinking of it in those terms, it didn’t seem possible; but then, the lunar landing must have seemed just as impossible back in 1959, when NASA didn’t yet exist, and technicians had taken Mercury boiler-plate capsules to the Cape on the backs of flatbed trucks, cushioned by mattresses.

  It was Bert Seger’s job to make Mars happen.

  Seger had been appointed, just a month ago, as a deputy director of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, one of NASA’s four big divisions. His job was running the embryonic Mars Program Office, here in Houston.

  Fred Michaels had become the new Administrator, after Tom Paine’s resignation, and he seemed determined to pull the Agency out of the mess his predecessor had left behind. And he had appointed Bert Seger himself.

  ‘Bert, the damn Mars thing is already coming apart at the seams, and we haven’t even got back the final Phase A definition reports yet. Look – I need someone to do for Mars what Joe Shea did for the Moon program, back in the early days. To pull the thing together. Or we’re never going to get it past Nixon.’

  Seger understood. ‘You need a foreman,’ he’d said. ‘And an enforcer.’

  ‘Damn right I do. Will you do it?’

  ‘Damn right I will.’

  ‘Then here’s your first job,’ Michaels had said. ‘Sort out the goddamn mission mode …’

  The competing industry contractors, preparing their Phase A preliminary studies, were all working on different ways of getting to Mars, but the routes they were planning were all direct: Earth to Mars, and back to Earth. Now there was some guy in Langley who was kicking up a fuss about another mode. Something to do with flying by Venus on the way.

  ‘Some little jerk called Dana,’ Michaels said. ‘Gregory Dana. He wrote direct to me. Can you believe it?’ Dana had bypassed all the bureaucratic channels, and had got right up a lot of asses.

  ‘Is he right? About Venus?’

  ‘How in hell do I know? Could I care less, at this point? This Dana has got them all – the Marshall guys, the rest of Langley, the contractors, the Budget Office, the damn Science Advisory Council – buzzing like wasps in a jar. The Requests for Proposal for Phase B detailed definition studies are about to go out. This Dana is putting all of that under threat. Bert, I want you to sort it out for me …’

  Seger didn’t doubt his own ability to resolve this mode issue. Nor did he doubt that he’d be able to fulfill his greater commission: to pull together the Mars program. If that was what the country decided it wanted to do.

  Seger always prayed, intensely, for a few minutes at the start of the working day, or before tackling a major task. He felt that showed his character had deep roots, strength, conviction. Standing there in the MOCR, he offered up a brief prayer now.

  He thought of that fragile little world two hundred and forty thousand miles away, where three LM descent stages still sat, surrounded by footprints and scuffed-up lunar soil. But the footprints, and the flags, even the science – none of that was really the point, as far as Seger was concerned. Not even getting there ahead of the Russians. To his mind, what Apollo had proved was that men could indeed travel to places beyond the Earth, and live and work there.

  The Moon hadn’t been as exotic as some had suspected. Some had predicted that the astronauts would sink into miles of dust. Or that the mountains of the Moon might be fragile, like huge gray meringues maybe, and would collapse in puffs of dust when the astronauts tried to walk there. Or maybe the moondust would catch fire, or explode, when the astronauts brought it into the LM. Or the astronauts would be afflicted by terrible diseases …

  In the end, those hard-headed engineers who had stubbornly insisted that the Moon would be just like Arizona – and had designed the LM’s landing gear that way – had turned out to be right. That’s what I gotta bear in mind, he thought. Mars will be just like Arizona, too.

  To Seger, that was a magical thought, as if Earth and Moon and Mars were somehow unified, physically, as they were bridged by the exploits of Americans.

  He walked carefully down the steps, away from the Flight Director’s console, and latched the door behind him.

  Monday, August 16, 1971

  George C. Marshall Space Center, Huntsville, Alabama

  Gregory Dana arrived late, his Vu-graph foils and reports bundled under his arm; by the time he reached the conference room – right next to the office of von Braun himself – it was already full, and he had to creep to the back to find a space.

  The room was on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building, colloquially known as the von Braun Hilton. Just about everybody who counted seemed to be here: senior staff from Marshall and Houston, a few managers from NASA Headquarters in Washington, and a lot of people from the contractors whose studies were being presented today.

  At the front of the room, so remote from Dana that it was difficult to see his face, Bert Seger, head of the nascent Mars Program Office, was making his opening remarks.

  They were all here to listen to the final presentations of the Mars mission mode Phase A studies. Their purpose today, Seger said, was to settle on a recommended mode for the development program. This group had to regard itself as in competition for resources and endorsement with the parallel studies going on into the reusable Space Shuttle; a similar heavyweight meeting had recently been held in Williamsburg to thrash out some of the conceptual issues involved in that program.

  In his rapid Bronx delivery Seger gave them a little pep talk: about the need for open discussion, for receptivity, and for a willingness for all here to walk out of this room with a consensus behind whatever mode was favored. Dana c
ould see a little crucifix glinting on Seger’s lapel, under a wilting pink carnation.

  Dana doubted that anyone missed the subtext of what Seger was saying. Congress was approving the requested funding for NASA’s FY1972, but the big expenditure for whatever program was settled on was going to start in FY1973. And President Nixon still hadn’t made up his mind about the future of the space program. It was said he might even can manned spaceflight altogether, and look for some superscience stunt on Earth that might prove a better fit with the mood of the times.

  Meanwhile there was open warfare going on between two of NASA’s centers, Houston and Marshall, over their preferred Mars modes.

  It was just what NASA didn’t need right now, and all the old hands at NASA had been here before, too many times. Dana knew that Seger had already been trying to get around the conflict by encouraging informal contacts and discussions, and by having the Houston people help with the devising of Marshall’s presentation, and so forth. And it was obvious that Seger’s intention today was to lance that boil before sending the recommendations further up the chain of command.

  Now Seger flashed up a draft agenda. The meeting was going to run for the whole day. The two major modes – chemical and nuclear – would be presented first, followed by the other studies …

  Dana found with dismay that his would be the last of the five major presentations. I’m coming at the nutty end, he realized. Even after the guys from General Dynamics with their ludicrous atomic-bomb motor. I’m being wheeled on as light relief. In the midst of this organizational in-fighting, he was going to be squeezed out; he had probably upset too many people by circumventing the hierarchy. He felt his stomach knot up with frustration and anxiety. Damn it, I know I’m right, that I have the way we should be going to Mars, right here in this folder. He pushed his spectacles up onto his nose, agitated.

  First up was the nuclear rocket option.

  Dana thought the timing was significant; this option, heavily pushed by Marshall, was, he had heard, the preferred option amongst the NASA brass.

  The presentation was opened by a hairy young man called Mike Conlig. Conlig reported into Marshall now, but he had worked for several years at the nuclear rocket development station in Nevada. ‘We’ve achieved twenty-eight starts of our XE-Prime liquid hydrogen prototype, running up in excess of fifty-five thousand pounds of thrust.’ Conlig showed a photograph of an ungainly test rig, framed by dismal mountains. ‘Next we will proceed to the development of NERVA 1, which will develop seventy-five thousand pounds of thrust. Then the full NERVA 2 module will be developed, to support the Mars mission itself. NERVA 2 will be flight tested in the mid 1970s, in fact launched into orbit as a new Saturn V third stage …’

  Conlig spoke well and enthusiastically; Dana let the data rattle through his head.

  Now a slim, cold-looking man, his blond hair speckled with gray, walked to the stage. ‘To achieve the necessary performance for interplanetary travel, we have evolved a “building block” technology, in which separate NERVA propulsion modules will be launched into Earth orbit, and clustered to achieve different requirements …’ The voice was shallow, a little clipped – overlaid by a disconcerting Alabama drawl, after all these years at Huntsville – but still underpinned by sharp Teutonic consonants.

  This was Hans Udet: Udet, who had worked at Peenemunde with von Braun, and now one of von Braun’s senior people at Marshall.

  Dana showed no reaction.

  Dana had dealt with the Huntsville Germans many times, over his years at NASA. And even now he recognized many faces from those ancient days in the Harz Mountains, here in the halls and offices of NASA.

  But he had never been recognized, in his turn – why should he be? – and he had never volunteered his identity. He had mentioned this antique link to no one. The Mittelwerk was buried deep in the past, and they had all moved on to new concerns.

  He’d never even discussed that part of his past with Jim.

  But he had never lost his sense of inferiority, before these confident, clever Germans.

  Udet put up foils showing two identical ships, to be assembled in Earth orbit. There would be four or six crew in each ship. The ships would be boosted out of orbit by disposable NERVA modules, and then docked nose-to-nose for the flight to Mars. Udet flashed up summaries of mission weights, flight durations, development costs and other key parameters. ‘Our baseline study,’ Udet said, ‘will allow us to launch to Mars in November 1981 …’

  It was a huge, grandiose scenario. Typical von Braun, Dana thought: unimaginative, brute force, over-engineered.

  Bert Seger opened the presentation up for questions. The hostile Houston contingent put in a lot of detailed probing about the untried nuclear technology: the difficulties of clustering the nuclear modules, progress on the advanced cooling techniques needed. There were also questions about the significance of the treaties banning atmospheric testing of nuclear technology; it seemed to Dana that these issues were still unresolved.

  Seger let the questions run on for some time – well over the option’s allotted slot – and then orchestrated a round of applause. All this reinforced Dana’s view that this was the mode preferred within NASA, unofficially, and Seger had a brief to make sure that it was fully understood and accepted.

  The second major presentation was of an all-chemical-engine mode. It was prepared by Rockwell, and championed by Houston staff. Rockwell were, incidentally, the favorites to be selected as lead contractor for the Space Shuttle.

  The mission profile, Dana soon saw, was close to the classic minimum-energy Hohmann transfer profile he’d sketched out to Jim, that day in the shop at the back of his house in Hampton.

  The chemical mode had some advantages. The development program would be comparatively cheap, since the hardware would be based on incremental upgrades of Saturn technology, for example the use of an enhanced Saturn second stage to serve as an orbital injection booster.

  But the nuclear camp from Marshall, led by Udet and Conlig, didn’t find it hard to pick holes in the case. Compared to the NERVA profile, twice as much mass would have to be hurled into Earth orbit, for a mission twice the length. Chemical technology couldn’t manage much better than that. Not without imagination, anyway, Dana thought; not if you stick to direct transfer …

  Dana knew that most of the points raised in the discussion were a repeat of the sterile arguments which had plagued NASA for some months.

  At the end of the question session Seger didn’t call for any applause.

  Lunch turned out to be steak and chicken served buffet style. The debate continued during the meal, with delegates making points by jabbing bits of steak or fried potato at each other.

  Dana spotted the sleek, handsome figure of Wernher von Braun himself. He was talking to an astronaut: Joe Muldoon, a moonwalker, tall, erect, his thinning, gray-blond hair clipped to military neatness.

  Few people spoke to the obscure little man from Langley with his peculiar presentation. Venus swingby modes? What the hell is that about? That suited Dana. He left the lunch early and returned to his seat in the hall; he didn’t much like steak anyway.

  * * *

  The conference looked at two more options, before Dana’s pitch. Both of these were more ambitious, technically, than either the main chemical or nuclear options reviewed earlier; Dana suspected they had been explored just to make sure nothing obvious was missed before the primary mode was selected.

  A representative of McDonnell presented a so-called nuclear-electric option, together with representatives of NASA and ARPA, the Government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Plasma – a charged gas – would be accelerated electrodynamically out of a rocket nozzle. A plasma rocket’s thrust was tiny, but would last for months; plasma rockets would move spaceflight techniques away, at last, from the antique Jules Verne kick-and-coast model. The technology was unproven, but there had been some trials; an electric rocket had been operated at high altitude as long ago as 1964.

 
The McDonnell man flashed up a conceptual design for a manned nuclear-electric ship. It was a staggering arrangement, like a three-armed windmill. Two of the arms – each fifty yards long – contained reactors, and the third the habitable section. The rockets were mounted at the hub of the rotor, and the whole thing was designed to spin about the hub, to provide artificial gravity. It would be, Dana thought, like a great metal snowflake, spinning toward Mars. It was a terrific concept, and utterly impractical.

  Next up was a project manager from General Dynamics. He got to his feet with a broad grin gleaming from out of a Californian tan. ‘I got to tell you,’ he told the audience deadpan, ‘that I can beat you NERVA folks hands-down. With two million pounds in Earth orbit I can get to Mars and back in just two hundred and fifty days – not much more than half your time – and taking no fewer than twenty guys. Gentlemen, I give you Project Put-Put.’

  The idea was to throw one-kiloton nuclear bombs out of the back of the spacecraft – thirty devices every second – and let them off, a thousand feet behind the ship. The shocks would be absorbed through water-cooled springs, and the ship would be driven forward. ‘Like setting off firecrackers behind a tin can. Am I right?’

  The concept seemed ridiculous, but General Dynamics had done some preliminary studies, called ‘Project Orion,’ in the early 1960s, and the presenter was able to show photographs of a small flight-test model which had used high explosives to hurl itself a few hundred feet into the air.

  The technical problems were all around the high temperature flux on the rocket’s back end structure, which would have to radiate away excess heat between explosions. And of course the system had one major drawback, the General Dynamics man said, and that was the radioactive exhaust. But that hadn’t seemed such an obstacle back in 1960 when the first Orion studies had been initiated. Then, it was thought that the unscrupulous Soviets might use this quick-and-dirty method to short-cut to space, so we had to look at it too.