Voyage (81 page)

Stone slapped his gloved hands together. ‘Let’s hustle,’ he said. He turned to his station, and Gershon did the same, and they began to rattle through a fresh checklist.

York’s job right now was to support the pilots. She hauled at levers to fold up the acceleration couches, leaving the cabin floor exposed; then she fixed restraints, elasticated cables, to the waists of the pilots as they worked.

Then she took her own position, standing in a corner of the little cabin, and hooked herself up to restraint cables.
Standing room only, all the way down to the surface of Mars
.

There was a sharp crack. Sunlight streamed into the cabin, strong and flat.

The conical upper heatshield, its function fulfilled, broke into segments and fell away, revealing a complex structure of propellant tanks and antennae. A plug popped out of the bottom of the craft, exposing the bell of the retropropulsion descent engine. All around the base of the MEM, six squat landing legs rattled out of their bays.

Challenger
had configured itself to land.

York could see out of the corners of the pilots’ down-slanting triangular windows. She saw sunlight, a violet sky, and a tan, curving landscape.

Hans Udet, a German-born NASA rocket expert, has renounced his US citizenship and returned to Germany, after facing the prospect of charges of war crimes, it was revealed yesterday.

Udet was one of Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket development team during World War Two. After the war, he came to America with von Braun to work on US space projects.

After the retirement of von Braun, Udet became one of NASA’s most senior managers, and he recently directed the development of the Saturn VB enhanced rocket booster. The VB will be used to launch the Ares manned mission to Mars, and has already been
launched successfully several times to deliver components of the Mars ship to Earth orbit.

Now, the Justice Department has told Udet that he must surrender his US citizenship and leave the country or face charges that he had been involved in a forced labor camp at Nordhausen in Germany where the V-2 was manufactured. The Department is apparently acting on information that has been in the hands of the Government for forty years.

Udet has apparently not been accused of committing atrocities, but of being aware of them, and failing to acknowledge that fact in his application for US citizenship. Udet maintains his innocence, but says that because of his age and financial situation he will not undertake the prolonged legal battle that the government suit would entail.

Under an agreement with the Department of Justice Udet left the US in January.

Senior colleagues within NASA have spoken out in Udet’s defense, calling the Justice Department action ‘cynical’ and ‘shabby.’ The feeling is that the Justice Department stayed its hand on this matter until after Udet had served out a lifetime of useful service for the Government.

Among those who campaigned on behalf of Udet within NASA was Dr Gregory Dana, father of dead Apollo-N astronaut James Dana, and a scientist who, this newspaper can reveal, was himself a conscript laborer at Nordhausen during the war …

Fred Michaels, who was NASA’s Administrator during its turbulent post-Apollo decade, died Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Texas. He was 76.

Born in Dallas in 1909, Michaels received a BA in education from the University of Chicago in 1933. He studied law and was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1939. He worked in private business from 1939 to 1963, save for a four-year spell in the Bureau of Budget. In this period he rose to become President of the Umex Oil Company, assistant to the President of Morgan Industries, and a member of the board of Southpaw Airlines. He joined NASA in 1963.

He served as Administrator of NASA from 1971 to 1981, when
he resigned subsequent to the loss of the Apollo-N test mission and the death of its astronaut crew.

Michaels’s reign at NASA was characterized by political astuteness. His stewardship was much more worldly than that of his predecessor, the visionary but ineffectual Thomas O. Paine. Michaels effectively managed both the internal conflicts between centers which have plagued NASA from its inception, and external pressures from political, budget and aerospace interests and such lobbies as the universities.

Michaels was criticized for a lack of vision. NASA under his stewardship was a throwback to the Apollo-era organization under James Webb (1906-), in which all activities, however worthy, were valued solely in terms of their contribution to a single goal – in Michaels’s case, the eventual Mars landing. NASA appeared to suffer from a lack of direction during much of the 1970s, and when a clear mission did emerge, in the aftermath of the Apollo-NERVA disaster, NASA was left with no vision of its future beyond the Ares project, and with its facilities and systems dangerously weighted to serve Ares alone. Michaels’s successors will face a formidable challenge in keeping the large organization and workforce in place once the primary goal has been achieved.

However history will probably look more kindly on Michaels’s achievements than do many of his contemporaries. In a time of dwindling budgets and growing hostility to the US civilian space program, he followed in the footsteps of Webb by building and maintaining a political coalition behind the manned space program, which he saw as the primary goal of his Agency.

Without Michaels’s shrewd handling it is possible – as former President John Kennedy remarked this week on hearing of Michaels’s death – that the post-Apollo space program would have crumbled. It is worth remembering that Mr Kennedy himself lobbied for Michaels’s appointment in 1971.

Whatever one’s view of this year’s man-to-Mars space spectacular, it is surely ironic that its principal architect has not lived to see it.

Mr Michaels is survived by his wife, Elly; three daughters, Kathleen Lau of Wilmette, Ill, Ann Irving of Pal Desert, Calif, and Jane Devlin of Rockville, Md; and eight grandchildren.

There was one final press conference in Houston, just before they were brought out to the Cape. By now the crew were in quarantine, and they had to come onto the stage wearing hospital masks, which they kept on until they were installed behind a plastic screen.

To York, exhausted, it was bizarre, unearthly, the questions and answers rendered meaningless by their endless repetition.

The
Life
issue of March 28 had a cover story called ‘Ready for Mars.’ Inside there was the usual domestic stuff: Stone playing catch-ball with his sons, Gershon at the wheel of his car, York – well, York in her den, wading through her correspondence, redirecting her mail, arranging for her goods to be taken into storage, smiling uncertainly at the camera. She’d generated her own cliche industry by now.
The dedicated scientist. The single woman, coping alone. The bright visionary, focused on the goal
.

She’d lost her critical faculties about the press coverage, actually. The whole thing was just a blizzard, whiting out around her. The
Life
piece could have been a lot worse. In fact the reporter had made the best he could, she supposed, of unpromising material.

A few days before the launch was due, they moved out of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn and into the crew dormitory, on the second floor of the MSOB at the Kennedy Space Center.

The Manned Spacecraft Operations Building was pretty comfortable, all things considered. There was a gym and a mess hall. And the crew quarters, tucked away inside what looked like a regular office building, were fairly luxurious compared to a lot of NASA facilities: from a mundane, sterile office, she walked through a locked door into a carpeted apartment with subdued lights, and separate bedrooms for the three of them.

It was the same apartment in which the moonwalking Apollo astronauts had bunked before their launches.

Her bedroom was individually decorated; it even had a TV. The three rooms had paintings hanging in them: nudes in two of them, a landscape in the third.

York got the one with the landscape. She stuck over it her grainy Mariner 4 blow-ups.

The astronauts were cut off in here. To protect the crew from
infection – and to keep at bay the pressure of the media attention – only ‘authorized personnel’ were allowed into the MSOB. That didn’t include family or friends.

There was nobody York particularly wanted to see, anyhow. Her mother had called, once, and talked about her own concerns. She wasn’t planning to come to the launch; she was going to be filmed watching it by some local TV company.

But she could see that Stone and Gershon, while relieved to get out of the glare of camera spots, were soon going a little stir crazy.

This was dumb policy. Why not let families in? Sure, there would have to be some kind of quarantine. But she could see how a little contact with children and spouses could go a long way to calming the soul.

Anyhow, whatever the merits and problems of the quarantine, to York it was a great relief. When she first shut the big heavy door of her MSOB room behind her, she threw her personal bag on the floor, flopped out on the bed, and slept through nine hours.

Ralph Gershon’s mouth was dry. That was the pure oxygen, pumping through his pressure suit.

Stone stood to his right, and York, silent, was behind them both.

Gershon ran over the readouts on his station. He’d already pressurized the descent engine fuel tanks, and he’d called up the right computer programs, and he’d taken sightings through the alignment telescope to check
Challenger’s
trajectory.

Houston was silent, listening, so far away they could do nothing to help.

Challenger
had turned over onto its back as it fell through the air, so that its landing radar pointed at the ground. The radar hadn’t got a lock yet. All Gershon had through his window was a triangle of gaudy violet-pink sky.

Stone said, ‘On my mark, three minutes thirty to ignition …
Mark
. Three thirty.’

Gershon set the switch to arm the descent engine.

Gershon was ready. He was in charge for the first time in the mission. It gave him a sense of liberation, of power. He could make
sure
nothing fouled up.

And besides, he’d completed this run a thousand times, in the sims, and in the MLTV trainer. He could do it with his eyes shut.

Sure you could. But this is Mars, pal. Maybe that big old world out there has different ideas
.

And now, this MEM was going to have to function better than any of the test articles that had preceded it.

‘I got a 63 for PDI,’ Stone said quietly.
63
: a relic from Apollo, a computer query about readiness to proceed to PDI, powered descent initiation.

‘Do it,’ Gershon said. ‘I got go.’

Stone pressed the PROCEED button. ‘Ignition.’

‘Right on time.’

Gershon felt nothing at first. But the gauges showed him that the descent stage engine was firing up to ten per cent of maximum, smooth as cream.

Then, after half a minute, the engine reached full thrust.

He still couldn’t hear anything, but the cabin filled up with a grating, high-frequency vibration. It was uncomfortable, something like the sensation of having your teeth drilled at high speed.
Different from the sims already
.

Challenger
slid down US Highway One, braking easily.

‘AGS and PGNS agree closely,’ Stone said. Stone was acting as the navigator now; he was telling Gershon that the redundant-pair primary and abort guidance systems were agreeing with each other. ‘We’re looking good at three, coming up … Three minutes. Altitude thirty-nine thou five.’ That height reading was still only an estimate from the two guidance computers, though; the landing radar had still not got its lock. And Stone would also be able to read
off
heights from the altimeter, although that instrument, working on the pressure of the unfamiliar Martian atmosphere, was experimental, and its data excluded by the mission rules.

‘Still go,’ Stone said. ‘Take it all at four minutes … We’re go to continue at four minutes.’

‘Rager,’ Gershon said tersely.

‘The data is good. Thirty-three thou …’

But now caution and warning lights were glowing on Gershon’s station. The landing radar should be working by now; it should have locked onto its own signals bouncing off the ground.

But it hadn’t achieved lock.

‘Where’s that goddamn radar, Ralph?’ Stone asked.

‘Punch it through again.’

‘Yeah.’ Stone tried.

‘Come on, baby,’ Gershon said quietly. ‘Let’s have the lock on.’ But there was no change. ‘Come
on.’

‘Does talking to it do any good?’ York asked dryly.

‘Shut up, Natalie,’ Stone said, distracted.

Gershon felt a stab of fury. Other data was still good. Velocity looked fine, and the altitude estimates from both AGS and PGNS were in agreement. But without the radar – and even if the altimeter worked – he was screwed. The mission rules said, No
radar lock by ten thousand feet and you abort
.

Stone said, ‘Try cycling the landing radar breaker.’

Gershon pulled out the radar’s circuit breaker, his muscles tense with anger, and shoved it back in its slot. ‘Okay, it’s cycled.’

The caution lights continued to show. No lock.

He turned to look Stone in the eye. ‘Fine day for a landing.’

He meant: Fuck the rules.
Fuck the radar. Fuck Houston; they’re so far away we’ll be on the surface by the time they know what’s going down. We’ve come too far to quit now. I say we go for a landing, by eye if we have to. Fuck it
.

Stone stared back at him.

Damn it, you cold bastard. What are you going to do?
Gershon could feel the cabin tip up around him; beyond his big window, sky and a fine edge of red landscape slid past.
Challenger
was beginning to pitch up, as it dropped closer to the ground.