Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (22 page)

After the first few shuttle launches we stopped going through the hassle of getting press passes. We could drive a mile to the beach and watch the things go up. It wasn't quite as exciting, fifty miles outside of the radius of destruction, but it was still being there.

So we bundled up against the unusual January chill and drove out onto Daytona's hard smooth beach, to join the horde of shivering tourists. It seemed to go without a hitch, one short hold and then blastoff. My wife took a dust-jacket picture of me with the rocket going up in the background, and then I returned to the car, so I could steady the heavy binoculars against the door. I focused on the shuttle and watched it explode.

It was surreal. I said “Oh shit,” or something equally profound, and my wife burst into tears, but the inexperienced people around us were cheering and chattering excitedly, thinking they had just witnessed booster separation. Most of a minute went by before they realized what had happened. We stood in the cold and watched the pieces fall and the smoke drift and then, like everybody, went home to live the canned reality of it over and over.

Not quite “like everybody,” of course, but not just because of writing a few articles and books. In some parallel, or slightly divergent, universe, I could have been one of the seven who died. I tried to get a ticket three different ways.

Back in the sixties, NASA had a “Scientist as Astronaut” program. Anyone with a Ph.D. in a physical science or engineering could apply; they would train you as a pilot and put you in the Apollo program. I got my bachelor's in astronomy and was accepted to graduate school in physics, aiming for the program. In between, though, I got drafted and went to Vietnam, where I suffered the above-mentioned explosion and hospitalization. I came back nominally disabled and deeply rattled—not the kind of person you want to put in charge of a gliding brick.

So I sat around writing books while the Apollo program went its way and NASA pasted together the shuttle. They sent out a call for Mission Specialists, and I was surprised to find that I could meet the preliminary requirements. But when I got the application, the damned explosion came back to haunt me again. The only physical requirement was in hearing; I'd returned from Vietnam with big blocks of frequencies permanently missing or masked by roaring and whistling tinnitus.

Then a third chance presented itself. When Carter was President they talked about sending up a writer. They weren't sure whether it would be a novelist, journalist, or poet—but y'all write, hear? Hell, I'd done all those things—I've won
awards
in all those things. I put in two applications, one solo and one as half of a writer/artist team with friend Rick Sternbach.

Of course no administration is bound by the promises of its predecessors. Besides, if you send up a poet or a novelist, he's liable to write any damned thing. So Reagan's people decided on a journalist, probably a television journalist, definitely one with a tame track record. But first let's send a couple of politicians, yeah, and then how about a teacher? We make the teachers happy, we can jack them around another four years. Maybe they won't notice the Department of Education has gone
desaparecido.

I suppose it is still possible for a left-leaning Vietnam vet writer to get a ticket on the shuttle. Maybe a special flight, along with labor leaders, former budget directors, and senators from Massachusetts. You can put a lot of extra people in there with the weight you save by taking out the landing gear.

Reflex sour grapes aside, brave talk aside, I have to wonder whether I really would say yes if they asked me now. A couple of hours after the
Challenger
exploded, I was interviewed by a local reporter who knew I had tried to get aboard, and she asked the obvious, and I gave the obvious answer: sure, I'd go on the next flight out. They'll analyze what went wrong this time and fix it, and fix a few other things, and it'll be safer than ever. One in 25 is long odds anyhow, I told her; like cutting a deck of cards and hoping not to come up with a red ace.

But there are still two red aces in the deck. All of us who watched those seven die must have spent some time trying to imagine what it was like. It would be good if they'd had no idea; here one microsecond and gone the next. But probably the three who had flown the shuttle before had time to hear or feel that something was wrong. We know that Smith, the pilot, did; eight seconds before the explosion, he started trying to compensate for the craft's wobbling. And there is still the horrible possibility that some or all of them survived the blast, and lived long enough to know that they were falling to their deaths. The mind glances away from this kind of extremity, this nightmare that has long been a part of most people's repertoire, at least people who fly. There can't be many truly good ways to spend your last moments on earth, but watching the ground or sea rush up to kill you has to be near the bottom of anybody's list.

So that's also in the “Would you go?” equation now, along with a few other things that weren't there before January 22nd. Like finding out that NASA's bureaucracy has as much Right Stuff as the Post Office. Like seeing Reagan, who late in life has developed a macabre sense of humor, appoint as head of NASA James Fletcher, who originally okayed the design compromises and presided over the creative budgeting that made the shuttle what it was. Sort of like giving the guy who designed Chernobyl the Order of Lenin, and the assignment to rebuild it.

The newspapers I read have soft-pedaled the political background of the disaster. I guess it's partly Reagan's inexplicable voodoo and partly NASA's residual Teflon. Yards of copy about O-rings and launch temperature, but not much about how the shuttle started out as the Rolls-Royce of outer space and wound up being the Ford Pinto. Let's take a look at it.

First, consider location. When the
Challenger
blew up, the people in control of it couldn't see what was happening—because they were in Texas. The Manned Space Flight Center in Houston takes over control of every manned mission as soon as it clears the tower. That doesn't make much sense in terms of engineering or even plain logic. It made a lot of sense to George Brown, though. This is how things work:

Brown & Root, Inc., as in George Brown & Root, was in 1961 the largest construction firm in Texas. We had a Texan Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, and a Texan Congressman, Albert Thomas, who was chairman of the House Independent Offices Appropriations Subcommittee. He was the guy who approved NASA's budget. Johnson was head of the powerful National Aeronautics and Space Council.

George Brown had been generous to both of them.

James Webb, NASA's first director, had only nine years to put a man on the Moon, and these two Texans were digging in their heels over his budget. He soon found out how to win them over. George Brown, who was also president of the governors of Rice University in Houston, would dearly love to have a major research facility located at Rice. How about the Manned Space Flight Center?

The deed was done, and Johnson was able to brag, “Rice University is going to be a major scientific center, along with MIT in the East and Caltech on the Coast.” Most of the design and construction contracts, of course, went to Brown & Root.
¹

For the record, it was more geography than politics that caused Florida to be the site of America's spaceport. If you launch from earth eastward, you get about a thousand-mile-per-hour boost from the Earth's rotation. That boost increases, the closer you are to the equator. And of course you want a lot of empty ocean to the east, in case you drop something. There's only one better location in the hemisphere, paranoia buffs: Nicaragua.

It's a nice irony that there's a plaque on the Moon with Richard Nixon's name on it. Nixon reportedly was hostile to the Apollo Project, seeing it as a memorial to the despised John Kennedy, and he certainly did everything in his power to scuttle the American space effort once we did get on the Moon and off again. The deficiencies of the shuttle are largely the result of Nixonian parsimony.

His Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was chairman of a Space Task Group, which in 1969 came up with three options for future space exploration. The most expensive, projected at $10 billion per year, called for the space shuttle, a 50-man space station, an orbiting lunar station, and a manned mission to Mars in the mid-1980's. The next was an Apollo-style push to put men on Mars by 1986, which would have cost about $8 billion per year. The cheapest recommendation was to develop only the space station and space shuttle, at $4–$5.7 billion per year. (In 1968, the year before the first moon landing, NASA spent $4.6 billion, which incidentally come to about a tenth of what the Department of Defense was soaking up.)

Nixon predictably chose the cheapest option, and then whittled it further down by holding off on the space station until after we'd seen whether the shuttle worked. Then NASA and the White House haggled some more over the price and design, winding up with a craft that would do less but cost half as much. (The Department of Defense stepped in during the process, threatening to withhold support unless they redesigned the cargo bay to accommodate a mysterious something this wide by that long.) Fletcher said he could deliver the craft by 1977, at a cost of $5 billion. It wound up being 1981 and $15.5 billion.

The design turned out to be lethal. If some engineer had initially proposed, back in the sixties, that we bolt a tiny spaceship to a big throw-away fuel tank and strap two solid-fuel rockets on the side to get it up to speed, they would have handed him his hat. Human beings riding solid-fuel rockets? How do they turn them off if something goes wrong? At least one Apollo astronaut looked at the machine and said he wouldn't go up in it.

The most promising early design, the “F-l Flyback,” used as a booster one large liquid-fuel rocket with a human pilot. It would take the shuttle up above most of the atmosphere, release it, and fly back to the landing field at Kennedy. That shuttle would have carried more and gone higher. But the design was projected to have cost $10–$13 billion; Congress and the OMB rejected it. (To be fair, it seems likely that the Flyback would have suffered about the same “cost growth” and “schedule slippage” as the system we wound up with, since it also involved fundamentally new, untested components.)

It looks as if the Soviets are developing a liquid-fuel flyback shuttle. The European Space Agency, undeterred by
Challenger
, is going with a smaller version of the American design.

So what is America going to choose? Reagan promised a replacement shuttle, but that's meaningless. Would it even be a good idea? Space scientists say no; the shuttle has been a disaster for them since the first blueprint, bleeding money away from science and bequeathing it to the manned space effort, which is emotionally satisfying (at least to the people who supply the money), but intellectually rather repetitive and sterile. The scientists would much prefer a reliable unmanned fleet with lots of payload opportunities.

The man-in-space supporters might also prefer that a replacement shuttle not be built. After all, it's ten-year-old technology, about as sexy as a 1976 car. It never has done what it was supposed to do: deliver payloads to low Earth orbit regularly and cheaply, providing a continuous American presence in space. They could argue that the billions would be better spent developing the next generation of orbiters, either the elegant scramjets or the utilitarian Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles (HLLV).

A scramjet is the sort of aircraft/spacecraft that Reagan referred to as the “Orient Express” in his post-
Challenger
speeches. He was pitching it toward his wealthy friends, who want to close a deal in Tokyo before lunch and be back in time for
Dallas
, but it does have more general utility. The main thing is that it can take off horizontally, from a conventional airport, and return to any other large airport after delivering a payload into low Earth orbit. The Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle, by contrast, is a brute-force unmanned ferry that carries factory-sized loads into orbit. Most designs just call for scaling up current booster rockets, though some are more exotic, using lasers or nuclear fuel—not too likely in the current intellectual climate.

It doesn't take too much savvy to predict that whichever course the Department of Defense thinks best will be the one that we pursue, at least until Reagan is flushed from the system. That would probably be the conservative course of replacing
Challenger
and, for their Star Wars eventuality, stepping up research on the HLLV. Or maybe someone will point out that the scramjet is the highest fastest bomber ever.

I'd like to see all three alternatives developed to some level of investment. Replace the
Challenger
, and in the course of building the new one, learn how to make the other three craft—with which we are definitely stuck—safer and more reliable. Build some unmanned one-shot launchers to put NASA back into its original business, the exploration of space. Develop the scramjet and HLLV so that America doesn't become the left-behind Portugal of the Space Age.

Finance it by giving Star Wars back to George Lucas.

It's four in the morning and I just came in from looking at Mars, which through the telescope presents a shimmering pale orange disk with elusive gray-green markings and the white gleam of a polar ice cap. Observing it gives me a bad case of déjà vu and what-might-have-been.

The orbit of Mars is rather elliptical; its distance from the Earth can vary by a factor of almost seven. It comes closest, about 35 million miles, only once each fifteen years or so, an event that astronomers call “most favorable opposition.”

Two such oppositions ago, in 1956, I was a boy with his first telescope, and the vaguely round orange blob that it revealed was full of mystery, and not only for me. Nowadays, with modern optics and computerized image enhancement, you could make a fairly accurate map of Mars from here. Back then, scientists only agreed on a few obvious markings, and couldn't say for sure whether they were vegetation or simply darker ground. (A few oppositions before that, the majority view was that the dark areas were oceans, but by 1956 we knew Mars was arid.)