Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  Lee said, ‘No. But I bet I know what you’re thinking of.’

  ‘The B-70. You worked on the B-70, didn’t you? With Harrison Storms.’

  ‘Yeah. With Stormy.’

  Harrison Storms was the man who had built the Apollo spacecraft for Rockwell. And before that, there had been the B-70, a supersonic bomber. Gershon remembered old photographs: that stainless steel surface painted white to reflect Mach 3 heat, the huge delta wing two stories off the ground …

  ‘Congress canceled the project on us,’ Lee said. ‘We only ever made two of the damn things. And I know one of them crashed with an F-104. I guess the other was scrapped.’

  ‘No. It survived. It’s in a museum.’

  Lee eyed Gershon and smiled. ‘How about that? I never knew.’

  Gershon glanced at his watch. ‘Come on. It’s gone nine. We have to go in.’

  ‘Sure. We don’t want to miss the read-through of the minutes, do we?’

  Side by side, they walked into the Brickyard.

  Two portly, shirt-sleeved aerospace executives were struggling with a balky Vu-graph machine. One said, ‘You sure you know how to fly this thing, Al?’

  Al laughed.

  Gershon tried to settle himself in the small, hard-framed chair, with his briefcase tucked under the table. It was already hot, airless, and his collar chafed at his throat.

  That word, ‘fly,’ tugged at him. Flying a projector. Flying a desk. Jesus. Words misused by people who knew no more about flying than how to order a drink from a stewardess.

  The chairman called them to order. He was Tim Josephson, a NASA Assistant Administrator, a tall, thin, bookish man. He sat on a swivel chair behind a desk at the head of the table, and rattled through the minutes and agenda.

  Lee leaned over to Gershon. ‘How do you like that? This is Dutch’s old office. That’s Dutch’s chair, for God’s sake. Rockwell must really, really, want this contract.’

  Behind Josephson the whole wall was covered with a mural. It showed a P-51 Mustang coming right out at you.

  Gershon wanted to be out of here, doing something.

  But life in the Astronaut Office wasn’t like that. You had to pay your dues.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Chuck Jones had said, in his role as chief astronaut. ‘We gotta have someone from the Office assigned to the Mars Excursion Module.’

  Gershon had thought he was being dumped on. ‘But there is no MEM.’

  ‘Even better.’ And Jones had spun Gershon a story about how Pete Conrad had helped to design the controls and instrument displays for the Lunar Module. ‘Conrad spent fucking months in plywood mockups of that lander, surrounded by painted switches and dials, trying to imagine himself coming down onto the Moon.’ Jones held his thumb and forefinger up, a hair’s breadth apart. ‘And he came that close to being the first man to land there. Now. You want to tell me you know more about how things work around here than old Pete Conrad?’

  So maybe this wasn’t such a bad assignment after all, Gershon had concluded.

  The trouble was, though, it still didn’t look as if the MEM was ever going to fly, except in the glossy promotional brochures of the aerospace companies.

  Landing a spacecraft on Mars wasn’t an easy thing to do. And that was just about the only thing everybody was agreed on. Even after you’d hauled ass all the way out there, you found yourself facing a planet that was an awkward combination of Earth and Moon: the worst features of each, Gershon supposed. That smear of air was thick enough that you couldn’t fly a tin-foil buggy on rockets right down to the surface, like the Lunar Module landing on the Moon; you were going to have to take a heatshield along. On the other hand, the air was too thin to allow you simply to fly your way down to the surface in a glider with wings, the way the Space Shuttle would have flown to Earth. You had to have some compromise, a bastard cross between a flying machine and a rocket ship.

  So disagreement was inevitable. After all nobody had done this before, tried to build a machine to land people on Mars.

  But there was a lot of money and politics involved, so, of course, the arguments went far beyond the technical.

  This Liaison Group was a relatively new initiative, and it came from Fred Michaels himself, as an attempt to cut through the mess of arguments holding up the MEM design. The Group got all the warring factions together – the aerospace people from Rockwell and McDonnell and Grumman and Boeing, and the NASA groups from Marshall and Ames and Langley and Houston – to thrash out the issues.

  The formal presentations started.

  First up was a delegation from Grumman, to present their current thinking.

  The Grumman MEM would come in from Martian orbit as a half-cone, like an Apollo Command Module split down the center. With the aid of a lot of electronics, the crew could actually steer the thing. Then, inside the atmosphere, the MEM would tip downwards, so that it was falling to the ground nose first. The heatshield shell would fall away, revealing something that looked like a fat Lunar Module, with landing legs that would spring out. The whole thing would come down on rockets mounted in the nose. On the ground, the MEM would unfold, with crew quarters swiveling out from the sides toward the ground.

  Grumman had built the Apollo Lunar Module. Gershon happened to know that Grumman had the tacit backing of Marshall, with Hans Udet and all the other old Germans. And so what you got was a kind of beefed-up Lunar Module, coupled with some typical brute-force heavy engineering from the Germans.

  The Grumman people had a model, a little Revell-kit version of the thing, which was all unfolding legs and rotating compartments and bits of plastic heatshield. Parts of it kept falling off in the hands of the nervous presenter. The thing looked ludicrously overcomplicated. When that upside down cone came apart, revealing all the plumbing inside, Gershon was reminded of an ice cream cornet.

  JK Lee leaned over and laughed quietly. ‘Christ, that thing is ugly. And you’d waste a lot of development effort.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The thing’s a bastard. Too many smart-ass ideas. You’d have to develop a new heatshield material, to cover that huge flat surface. And you’d have to figure out how to build a lifting body to fly in the Martian atmosphere. And you’ve got a whole new Lunar Module to build as well. And for what?’

  ‘So what would you do?’

  ‘Me? If I was Grumman? I’d tell my designers to cut out the ice cream and focus on the meat and potatoes. Pick one approach and stick to it. If you’re building a lifting body, fine. Don’t give me damn Moon-bug legs as well.’

  The delegation led by Boeing weren’t too specific about the details of their landing craft itself; instead they concentrated on how it would get down through the atmosphere. Their MEM would descend from orbit and go through reentry, and then, about six miles up and still traveling faster than sound, it would sprout a ballute – a cross between a balloon and a parachute, a huge, inflatable sail that would grab at the thin air. Then, a complex sequence of parachutes would bring the craft close enough to the surface for hover rockets to take over for the landing.

  The problem was that nobody had yet made a ballute, or even tested one in a wind tunnel. And it would be all but impossible to test in the thicker atmosphere of Earth.

  A lot of the Boeing presentation was to do with the technicalities of packing parachutes. It was deadly dull. Gershon made himself take notes on his jotting pad; but sometimes, when he glanced down at the pad, he didn’t recognize what he’d written.

  The third presentation was from Rockwell themselves, backed by a combination of Langley and JPL. And this was the most advanced option of all. It was another lifting-body shape, but more advanced than Grumman’s crude half-cone: it was a biconic, a segment of a fat cone topped by a thin nose. This MEM would be able to enter the Martian atmosphere direct from Earth, without the need to stop over in a parking orbit around Mars first. The biconic would be controlled one hundred per cent by the pilot, with a joystick and rudder pedals. The ship would follow a complic
ated entry path, dipping and swooping and swirling, losing heat gradually and bleeding off speed. And then, approaching the surface, the biconic would tip up and land on its tail, ready for an ascent back to orbit.

  But there were drawbacks. The electronics would be so complex there was no way an astronaut could land the thing in the case of computer failure. And all those curved surfaces would take a lot of buffeting from the air; the biconic would need heavy heatshielding over most of its surface.

  The biconic looked to Gershon like a hybrid of Langley’s traditional love of aircraft, and JPL’s expertise in robotics and computer control, all mixed up together with Rockwell’s immense appetite for fat and ambitious development budgets.

  Looking at the presentation, Gershon felt an odd itch in the palm of his hands and his feet.

  Lee was grinning at him. ‘I can see that look in your eye. You’d like to fly that thing down through the Martian air, maybe do a couple of banks over Olympus Mons.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Lee waved his hand. ‘I’m not mocking you. But you need to understand that you’re looking at a twenty-year development effort there, minimum, in my judgment. Christ, nobody’s flown a biconic ever. Not even a fucking wooden mockup. Unless the Russians are up to something, which I doubt.

  ‘And then you’re talking about building a biconic to land on Mars. What do we know about the atmosphere of Mars? Boy, if you want to see your grandson flying down onto all that red dust, then you put your money on a biconic. But you and I sure ain’t going to see it …’

  The three presentations took them right through the day and on into the evening. Then, in a long final session, the meeting argued out the merits of the comparative designs: possible crew sizes, surface stay capabilities, gross weight in Earth orbit, required delta-vee, aerodynamic characteristics like lift-to-drag ratio. It all got bogged down in picky detail, and it became clear to Gershon after a while that all sides were more intent on filibustering than reaching any kind of decision.

  Gershon stared at Dutch Kindelberger’s mural of the Mustang, and wondered what it had been like to fly.

  As the meeting broke up, around nine p.m., the delegates began to make plans to rendezvous in various bars.

  JK Lee approached Gershon. ‘You’re looking kind of strained.’

  Gershon grinned at him. ‘I like the idea of a couple of pitchers of cold beer. But not in some shitty bar with these corporate suits, frankly.’

  ‘Yeah. Listen. You want to get out of here? It’s a clear night. We could take a drive, maybe up toward Edwards.’

  Edwards Air Force Base. Up on the high desert. ‘Let’s go.’

  They got out of the Brickyard. Lee pulled his little black T-bird out of the parking lot, and they stopped to pick up a couple of six-packs, and then Lee headed north, out of the city.

  The night was crisp and cool and cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the conurbation’s sulphur-orange glow. Gershon had to tilt his head back and stare straight up to see any stars, in a little clear circle of sky directly above him. He thought he recognized the big square of Pegasus up there, the winged horse.

  He had a sense of confinement, as if the city and all its smog was a great big box he was stuck inside.

  Lee drove one-handed, hanging onto the T-bird’s wheel with one finger. ‘I remember coming up here. I mean, 1955 or earlier. The days of the B-70. The road out of the city was just a two-lane blacktop, winding up out of the Newhall Pass and through Mint Canyon, until it gave onto the high desert And Palmdale was just a gas station, with a whole bunch of Joshua trees … All changed now, huh.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘So. You had a good day?’

  Gershon grunted. ‘Not one of my best.’

  ‘You’re not a lover of engineering debate.’

  ‘That wasn’t a debate about engineering. And most of those guys sure weren’t engineers.’

  Lee hooted. ‘You’re right there. But you got to understand the politics, my friend. Look at it this way. When Nixon canned the Space Shuttle, back in 1972 – well, that wasn’t the most popular decision with the big aerospace boys. They would have loved the Shuttle because the whole damn thing would have been new. They would have been able to throw away all their old Saturn tooling facilities and start afresh, at great public expense. But with the incremental program we’ve got now, everything is a derivative of something else. And it’s all pretty much owned by the companies who designed those pieces.

  ‘So you got Boeing working on the new MS-IC, for example, the enhanced Saturn first stage, which was what they’d originally built. And McDonnell Douglas, over at Huntingdon Beach, have built the Skylabs and Moonlabs – space stations lashed up from disused Saturn third stages – which McDonnell built in the first place. And so on.

  ‘But the plum contract – the most advanced technology, the real glamor work for the next decade – is going to be the MEM. A whole new spacecraft, to take a few guys to the surface of Mars. Making a lot of other guys very rich in the process …’

  ‘But NASA hasn’t even issued a Request For Proposals yet.’

  ‘Of course not. What do you expect? NASA’s taking too much heat from its contractors. And then on top of that you got all the usual bullshit infighting between the NASA centers.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Gershon said gloomily. ‘But we’ve already pissed away six years, since ’72.’

  ‘You want to fly something before you retire.’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Hell, I understand that. Listen, you want to break open that six-pack?’

  ‘You want one?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Gershon’s can was still dewed from the store’s refrigerator. The beer was crisp in his mouth; he felt some of the tension of the day unwind.

  The San Gabriel Mountains were behind them now, and Lee pushed the T-bird hard through the blackness. The road was vacant, laser-straight, fore and back, in the lights of the T-bird.

  Now, there were stars all the way down to the horizon. JK Lee propped the wheel between his bony knees, and, holding his beer in one hand, extracted a cigarette and lit it up with the other. The light of the tip combined with the dashboard’s glow to cast soft, diffuse light over his face.

  Gershon asked, ‘So what would you do?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘If you were going to build a MEM.’

  ‘Me? Oh, we aren’t going to bid. We’d ruffle too many feathers. And the big boys would crowd us out anyhow. Rockwell is going to get the contract. Everybody knows that. They’ll pull strings, just like they did to get Apollo. I understand the MEM was part of the deal, kind of, when Nixon canceled the Shuttle. That and their Saturn second stage injection-booster project. You got to balance your constituencies.’ His Bronx accent came out comically on that last word.

  Gershon grunted and pulled at his beer. ‘But if you were bidding,’ he pressed.

  ‘If we were?’ Lee thought for a moment, balancing his beer on his lap. ‘Well, you got to adjust your philosophy to accommodate the situation. You might get just one shot at this, a trip to Mars. So you want something that you know you can build quickly, and cheaply, that’s gonna work first time. And we don’t know if lifting bodies and biconics are going to work, and we could spend a lot of time and money finding out they don’t.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So you use what’s worked before. Start with a low L-over-D shape, say of zero point five.’

  L-over-D: lift over drag, the key aerodynamic measure of shape. ‘Point five. That’s an Apollo Command Module shape.’

  ‘Exactly. Build a big, fat Command Module. All you’d need to figure is how to build a wider heatshield. We know it’s a design that works. Apollos flew eight manned Moon program flights, and since then three missions a year to Skylab, and one a year to the Moonlab since ’75 … what’s that, twenty-five flights? And the Apollo 13 CM even survived its Service Module exploding under it.’

  ‘You’d have no maneuverabili
ty in the Martian atmosphere.’

  ‘Not as much as a biconic, but you’d have some. Just like with Apollo. If you offset the center of gravity you get a certain amount of control, with lift coming from the shape. And here’s the thing. The aerodynamics would be simple enough for you to fly the fucking thing down by hand if you had to, even if the electronics failed. You couldn’t do that with a biconic.’

  ‘What about after the atmosphere entry? Parachutes?’

  Lee thought about it. ‘Nope. Air’s too thin. You’d have to have some system of busting out of the heatshield and landing on a descent engine, like the Lunar Module. Like the Grumman bid, I guess. And then you’d have an ascent stage, the top half of the cone, to get you back to orbit. You’d leave behind the heavy heatshield, and all the surface gear.’

  It all made sense to Gershon. It would be low cost, low development risk, low operational risk. It’s all I need, to land on Mars. And you could have the thing flying in a few years.

  ‘JK, you ought to put in a bid. I’m serious.’

  Lee just laughed.

  He waved ahead, gesturing with his can. ‘Look out there.’

  Gershon saw that the desert here was a flat, pale white crust in the starlight. Salt flats. And, on the horizon, a row of lights appeared out of nowhere, like a city in the desert.

  ‘Edwards,’ Lee said. ‘Where I came with Stormy Storms to watch the X-15 fly. Christ, they were the good days.’ He took another pull of his beer, then threw the can out of the car.

  Gershon handed him another can, and the T-bird sped on, as the giant hangars of the Air Force Base loomed out of the darkness around them.

  Monday, August 7, 1978

  Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  She was held up for an hour at Building 110, the security office of the JSC campus.

  How are you supposed to present yourself, if you’re a rookie astronaut reporting for your first morning’s work? You have no identification badge on your shirt pocket, because on that first day, you have to enter the Space Center grounds to have the badge issued …