Voyage (51 page)

‘In space, one needs the courage and resourcefulness to continue to work on a problem long after an average person, with hope of rescue, might have given in. And this is what I begin to instill in you now.’

York was tired, in pain, hugely irritated. The trouble was, there was a strand of thinking inside NASA that approved of the Soviets’
tough approach: mostly the old military fly-boys, who seemed to think NASA astronauts were getting pampered. Joe Muldoon, for instance, Viktorenko’s great Moon-orbiting buddy.
Yeah, pampered. Especially all these goddamn new-fangled hyphenated-astronauts who want to go to Mars …

She said, ‘All this macho training didn’t help Ben Priest and the others, did it?’

Viktorenko studied her. More gently he said, ‘No. It did not help Ben Priest.’ He plucked at the cuffs of his thick sweater. ‘Listen, Natalie. There is an old Russian folk tale. A young woman named Marushka was famous for being able to embroider fantastical designs. Her fame reached the attention of Kaschei the Immortal, an evil sorcerer, who fell in love with her and wished her to go away with him. She turned him down, despite his magic powers, for she was modest, and wished only to stay in the village where she was born.

‘Enraged, Kaschei turned her into a fire-bird with brilliant plumage, and himself into a huge black bird of prey. The bird of prey seized the fire-bird in its talons and flew away with it.

‘Marushka, realizing she was dying, willed that she should shed her plumage. Her feathers fell to the ground on the land she loved.

‘Marushka died, but her feathers were magical. They remained alive, but only to those who appreciated beauty and chose to share it with others …

‘So it is with death, among us. No
kosmonaut
dies in vain, Natalie York.’

The Command Module rocked harder, swinging back and forth through thirty, forty degrees. Water lapped, gurgling, against the hull. York had a nightmare vision of the capsule sinking, dragging them, padded trousers and all, down to the bottom of this lousy little salt lake.

It’s so hot in here
. Her head seemed full of blood; she could feel her pulse at her neck, and there was a yellow haze at the edge of her vision.

Christ. I’m going to faint
.

But then the cabin tipped again, over to the right, and her stomach knotted up. Saliva pooled at the back of her throat. No.
No, that’s not fainting
.

She turned away from the others, toward the wall; when it came, the vomit splashed against the port and wall and slid down under her seat.

There was a hand on her shoulder. ‘York. You okay?’

It was Gershon; she waved him away. She tried to talk, but her throat was still closed up.

And then the stink hit Gershon. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He lunged, sticking his head over the back of his couch, and began to throw up too, in huge, noisy spasms.

Viktorenko laughed. ‘So,
Bah-reess,
only you and I are able-bodied seamen, eh?’

‘Fuck,’ Ralph Gershon groaned.

The water lapped against the hull of the Soyuz, and Boris the cosmonaut dangled from his silver chain above York’s head.

She wondered what had happened to Gershon’s gum.

… We have no hesitation in devoting this editorial exclusively to the report of the Presidential Commission into the Apollo-N space disaster, which has at last, after weeks of leaks, rumors and counter-rumors, been formally published. The report is 3,300 pages long and weighs in at nineteen pounds, and it does not mince words. The report makes it clear that the accident was not the result of a chance malfunction, in a statistical sense, but rather resulted from an unusual combination of mistakes, coupled with a deficient design.

The Apollo-N disaster has sparked a fresh national debate, led by a skeptical Congress, over whether the country should be spending tens of billions of dollars on a ‘footprints-and-flags’ program to send men to space, when it faces so many problems at home. Public opinion polls find many citizens asking if the program is costing too much, and feeling that any trip to Mars would be as much a political stunt as was the Apollo race to the Moon.

Meanwhile, many prominent scientists, such as Professor Leon Agronski, a former science adviser to President Nixon, are arguing in public fora that less expensive unmanned probes could teach us more about the composition of Mars and the other planets than astronauts.

On the other hand, supporters of the space program point out that the average American spends much more per year on cigarettes and alcohol than on sending fellow countrymen to other planets, and that untold scientific and technological benefits will flow from the continuing program.

This paper remains skeptical.

The most damaging pan of the Commission report is a frank indictment of NASA and its senior contractors. The Commission’s investigation revealed many deficiencies in design and engineering, in manufacturing and quality control. Numerous examples have been exposed, in addition to the simple and avoidable defect that led to the tragedy itself.

This newspaper is appalled at the incredible complacency of NASA engineers. Even a high school physics student would have known not to allow a nuclear core with instability built into its very design onto an operational space mission.

It seems likely that this nation will continue on to Mars, and beyond; successes in space travel have become essential to the image of the United States as the world’s leading power in science and technology: an image projected to the Soviet Union, our allies around the world, the uncommitted nations of the Third World, and – perhaps most importantly – to our own citizenry. And we should not forget the cold, cynical political calculation that a cancelation of the space program would immediately cause a drastic oversupply in the aerospace industry, and inevitable job losses and shutdowns in that area.

But as we put Apollo-N behind us and strive to move forward, we should never forget how the dry technical prose of the Presidential Commission report convicts those in charge of NASA of gross incompetence and negligence …

Joe Muldoon called on Fred Michaels in his office in Washington. He arrived a little after seven, having flown out from Houston.

Without getting up, Michaels waved Muldoon to a chair. ‘Sit down, Joe. It’s good to see you. You want a drink?’

‘Sure.’ Muldoon sat uncertainly, studying Michaels.

There was a decanter and glasses in a corner of Michaels’s desk; Michaels poured Muldoon a careless couple of fingers and passed it over. It was good Kentucky bourbon. The place was darkened, somber, with the lights dimmed; the brightest source of light was the small TV set in one corner of the room, which was showing a news program, with the sound off.

Michaels rocked back in his chair, with his boots on the corner of his wide desk; his gold-braided vest hung open, and the dim
light emphasized the deep grooves in his face as – in typical Michaels style – he waited for Muldoon to say what he wanted to say.

Muldoon began to tell the Administrator about the progress he was making in his new role as head of the Program Office. ‘The NERVA contractors were running a fucking country club, Fred. And those bastards at Marshall have been letting them get away with it.’

Michaels, with one eye on the TV, shrugged. ‘That’s maybe a little harsh, Joe. We’ve been putting them all under a hell of a lot of schedule pressure. Maybe too much.’

‘No, it’s not that. In a lot of cases it’s just sloppy practice. For instance, the first time I went up to the S-NB test installation at Michoud I found some of the technicians going for a few beers with their lunch. That’s just outrageous, when you’re working on man-rated hardware. And I saw some guy pumping lox out of a tank on the ground up into an umbilical tower. I asked him where the lox was going. “Beats the hell out of me,” he said. Once it got out of the other end of his hose, that little guy didn’t have a clue what happened to the lox. After that, I told them that I wanted every engineer to learn everything there is to know about every system he was running – where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. Every one of those guys has got to know his system from womb to tomb.

‘I made a list – I copied you on it – of thirty-odd things that got up my ass, in my first hour up there. Lousy materials handling, mixed-up demarcation of work spaces, wasted time …

‘Sure, the schedule pressures are working against us, too. With the sloppy practices the manufacturers have got, there’s no way they can keep to their development timetables. And then they cut corners on testing, to try to make the end date, which means you end up with a candle that’s late
and
lousy quality.’

Michaels was nodding, rubbing the thick jowls under his chin. ‘Yeah. I understand. You’re doing a good job, Joe. You’re doing just the job I hired you for.’

‘Fred, we’ve gone wrong, somewhere. We scraped this kind of crap out of Apollo; back then we had an operation, right across the country, that was as slick as snot. But now we’ve slipped back.’

Michaels grunted and sipped his drink. ‘Maybe. But we had many things working for us, back then. A goal you couldn’t have defined more sharply, a lot of goodwill – even though Congress squeezed the budgets – and, hell, I don’t know, a kind of romance about it all.
We were still moving outwards, Joe; it was still a great adventure, a time of firsts, every year. And we had one hell of a schedule pressure; we still thought the Russians might beat us to it.

‘Now,’ he ruminated, ‘it’s different. All the forces working on us have changed. Even though we’ve got the prospect of Mars, somewhere out there in the future, we’ve been mooching about in Earth orbit for a decade, and what the hell have we got to show for it but a couple of tin-can fuel-tank ’Labs, Apollo hardware still in orbit a decade after the Moon landings, a Saturn upgrade booster that hasn’t flown once, and a lethal bucket of bolts called NERVA?’

‘Yeah, but you have to take a positive view of it, Fred. Skylab A is still operational, nearly a decade after it was launched. What if we’d abandoned it? – let it fall back to Earth? What a hell of a waste that would have been; we’d have been a laughing stock. And Moonlab is still up there –’

‘Okay, okay. But it’s still just Apollo applications. Nothing we didn’t design in the ’60s. And meanwhile, the world is moving on, Joe. We don’t have the lead that we had a decade ago. The Russians have kept on flying Soyuz and Salyut –’

‘But our stuff is advanced over theirs.’

‘Maybe, but their endurance records have been beating the pants off us. And the Soviets aren’t the only ones. Even our buddies are moving into the gaps we’re leaving. The Europeans have been flying their Ariane for a couple of years, so we’re soon going to lose out in terms of commercial launches too, to our so-called allies.’

He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fleshy fingers, and closed his eyes. ‘Ah, hell. Another eight or nine years on, and here I am again trying to reshape the space program for another new president. And once again I’m trying to figure out the way the future is going to pull at us, and which way the new White House is likely to jump. Maybe it’s not so obvious to you guys; I know what it’s like when you’re buried inside the program. But things are so different now, from 1971, and 1960; so different …’

Muldoon grunted. ‘Oh, I look around, Fred. I can see the changes. In spite of the Afghanistan thing, the Cold War is done now. Or at least, people want to think so. And if space was all about fighting the War symbolically –’

‘Then what use is it now?’ Michaels smiled over his glass. ‘You got that right. We were happy enough to play that card when it suited us, Joe; maybe we couldn’t have flown without it. But now people have had enough, and we’re being paid back. But on the other hand …’

Muldoon prompted, ‘Yeah?’

‘On the other hand, maybe there are still some angles we can use. You know Reagan is expanding his military spending.’

Muldoon grunted. ‘Sure. Just as he’s cutting taxes, and the rest of the budget.’

‘And I don’t think that’s going to go away, not during Reagan’s term.’ Michaels was thoughtful, calculating. ‘Haig is saying that all of Carter’s human rights stuff was misguided; that what we’ve got to do now is counter the Soviets, who are still the main threat.’

‘So what does that mean for us, Fred?’

Michaels smiled, tiredly. ‘You got to see the angles. We have to position ourselves so we’re in the part of the budget that gets expanded, not the part that gets cut. If all that money is going to flow into defense, then we’ve got to be in the way of that flow. Divert a little bit.’ He sipped his drink. ‘Then you got Reagan himself. That old ham. You know, I’ve been working with Reagan and his people since he was nominated. And I think it’s possible he might want to emulate Kennedy. Or rather, finally put Kennedy in his box, after all these years. You know that in the Republican platform last year, Reagan attacked Carter/Kennedy for not keeping up NASA’s funding the way they should have. Now, he has to deliver on that.

‘And maybe, for Reagan, the state of flux we’re in after the NERVA thing is an opportunity. A chance for him to shape events. The space program is like a litmus test for new Administrations, when they come in, a way for them to prove themselves. You had Kennedy and the Moon, and Nixon and his long-range Mars program … Joe, I think if we could come up with some program, some clear goal, that promised to restore our image, and put us back in the lead in space in a few years’ time – say, in five or six years, within his possible term of office – Reagan might buy it.’ His rheumy eyes gleamed. ‘And now’s the time to strike, while his Administration is settling in. But –’

‘But what?’

‘But Reagan’s no Kennedy. And Bush sure as hell is no LBJ. An announcement isn’t enough. I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to assemble, and keep, a coalition of interests behind any such program. And besides, if NERVA’s a busted flush, what the hell have we got to give Reagan anyhow, Joe?’ He poured himself another drink. ‘Ah, God. I tell you, I don’t know if I can do it any more. I’ve used up a lot of credit on the Hill over the years, in the endless program delays and overspends. And now this NERVA
thing. I don’t know if I can go in there and start fighting again. I don’t know if I should even be trying anymore.’