Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (24 page)

This is the set-up at the Cape. There's a large Press Center that is the nucleus of action for the real working press. Typewriters clacking, hot-lines to Western Union, Telex machines and cigar smoke and hello-sweetheart-give-me-Rewrite. The Press Center itself publishes reams on reams of material, handouts given to the reporters in the hope that they'll keep their facts straight. This stuff is meat and drink for a science fiction writer. It's nitty-gritty detail about real space ships, about how real astronauts live and work, literally hundreds of pages. But you don't get into the Press Center without a badge, and they don't give badges to people who write that Buck Rogers crap.

(As an aside, I note that they ought to. It's reasonable to assert that there never would have
been
a space program without science fiction—or at least there would have been a hell of a lot fewer scientists and engineers in the appropriate specialties—and the role of science fiction in providing visibility and promoting public support for the space program is undeniable. Perhaps we do romanticize it, but at the risk of footnoting a footnote, I have to quote Timothy Leary, who in a rare moment of lucidity pointed out that only the U.S. government could take the greatest adventure in the history of mankind and make it boring.)

So what you do, once a launch date is set, is start calling up every editor you know. All you need to get a press pass is a letter under a legitimate publisher's letterhead, confirming that you're going to be covering the launch. In fact, the editor might blackmail you and force you actually to write an article. But I'd guess that at any given launch, as many as half of the people with press badges are actually space junkies in disguise. NASA knows this, of course, but it would be difficult to prevent, and the fakers don't do any harm so long as they stay out of the way.

Some of them don't even go to the Press Center, as a matter of fact, because all they came for was the fireworks.

I've tried many times to describe what an Apollo launch felt like—having been one of those who actually did have to write articles—but have never succeeded completely. It's too visceral an experience. Writing about it is like writing about food or sex. My favorite food is caviar, but if you've never tasted it there's not much I can do to truly evoke what it tastes like: complex, salty, kinda fishy…take my word for it, it's really good. If you've only seen a launch on television you're like someone who's only read the label on a jar of caviar.

Some hours before the launch, usually before dawn, we'd load our various typewriters and cameras aboard a fleet of buses and take off down the miles of ruler-straight road cutting through the mangrove swamp that separates the launch complex from the rest of NASA's establishment at the Cape. The isolation is partly a safety precaution, since the fuel in that space ship has as much energy as a small atomic bomb. It's also sensible to keep most of NASA's electronic bric-a-brac a good distance away from the God-awful noise and vibration that a Saturn 5 makes when it blasts off.

The buses drive by the Vehicle Assembly Building—a hollow cube of concrete so huge that clouds can form up by the ceiling, and make it rain indoors—and on to the press site, which is a covered-bleacher arrangement some three miles from the launch pad.

(This puts it right on the edge of the “radius of destruction,” should the ship blow up on the pad. The VIP viewing area is a couple of miles farther back. Journalists write stories but politicians sign appropriation bills.)

The press site has tables for your typewriters, phone jacks, TV monitors, trailers with coffee and sandwiches. It's a hectic and exciting place, tension mounting as the countdown rolls toward zero. At one minute, a sepulchral voice from the loudspeaker counts down second by second. Then there's a small flame at the base of the rocket, and a laconic “We have ignition”—and the flame gets brighter and brighter, until it's difficult to look at, even in broad daylight.

The speed of noise at sea level is 331 meters per second, so it takes about fourteen seconds for the sound to reach the press site. The ship begins to lift. For the first few moments, the sound is just a faint sigh. You can still hear the reporters around you, everyone standing, muttering “go…go…Jesus…look at that…”—but the sound mounts swiftly and saturates the audible spectrum, from nearly subsonic gravel to piercing scream; your ears overload and, nearly deaf, you start to feel it washing over your skin, feel it grinding in your bones and guts. Then as the rocket rises away, the noise begins to abate, to merely a roar, to a whisper lost in the ringing of your ears.

There aren't any civilian sounds to compare to that. I heard something similar in the army, working as a demolition engineer, when we set off several tons of high explosive from a quarter-mile away. It wasn't quite as loud, though, and didn't last long, and it didn't get anything to the Moon.

The most dramatic launch was the last moon shot, Apollo 17, the only night-time blastoff. The press site was crowded with more reporters and junkies than I'd seen in any previous launch, and there seemed to be ten times as many cameras as before.

The camera situation was interesting and, to some people, disastrous. The press site sits over a body of water, like a wide canal that does eventually wind its way to the sea. Before sundown, the edge of the canal was an unbroken continuum of tripods.

One photographer saw a unique opportunity: just over the bank of the canal was a solid ledge, big enough to safely hold his tripod. He set up his camera, got it aimed and focused, then clambered back up and went off to get some coffee. He forgot about tides, though. When he came back, King Neptune had a new Nikon.

There was a lot of suspense associated with the photography, because nobody had the faintest idea of what the proper exposure parameters were going to be. Nothing like this had ever been filmed before, and as it turned out, the best pictures were taken by people who were equipped with large film packs and motorized advances—taking two or three pictures a second, while opening and closing the iris of the lens to cover a wide range of f-ratios. Assuming their cameras were still in place. Many of them wound up lying on the ground.

Nobody had noticed the resemblance of that line of tripods to a row of dominos. At lift-off somebody knocked over the camera next to him, which knocked over the next one, and so on down the line. I was safely up in the bleachers, but I'm told there was a sort of lynch-mob sentiment down by the water.

The Saturn 5's first stage is powered by five Rocketdyne F-l engines, about which more later—and though they make a truly awesome sight by day, at night it's like nothing else made by humans. Seconds after ignition the night was simply driven away, replaced by an eerie orangish ambience almost like dawn—but not quite the right color, and the sun was rising awfully fast.

The first noise was birds, thousands of them. Cape Kennedy is in the middle of a bird sanctuary, and we had them all fooled, at least for a few seconds. I suppose when the noise of the blast came rolling in they realized, hell, it's just another rocket, and went back to their nests.

Oh, but it was beautiful. The only thing I can compare to it would be a total solar eclipse—and if you've never seen one from inside the path of totality, well, there you are again, reading the label on the jar.

From then on it sort of tapered off. There were other Saturn 5's for Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, and I did go to most of them, but there would never be another night launch. Perhaps it's just as well; perhaps there are things that should only be done once.

15 July 1975 was the end of an era, then, when the last Saturn 5 sputtered out and fell into the sea. I enjoy watching the little rockets go up (like the minuscule Titan-Centaur, that can only put 19 tons into orbit), and in fact I've moved to Florida so that I can just walk out onto the beach and watch them fly. I'd assumed that I'd seen the last of the big ones; that the shuttle was going to be a rather subdued little taxi. After all, it's only about half the size of the Apollo vehicle, and all three of its main engines together produce less thrust than one of those five F-1 monsters.

Well, an article in the paper last week claims I'm wrong; that the shuttle launches will be even
more
spectacular than the Apollo ones. I got out my calculator and my
Jane's Book of Space Exploration
—and, by God, it does look possible. I had underestimated the energy pent up in those two solid-fuel boosters they have strapped on the side, like an afterthought. Each of them has nearly twice the thrust of an F-1—and intuitively it seems likely that solid fuel will make a brighter and louder splash than lox plus kerosene.

The junkie's fingers start to twitch. I already have my press credentials (legitimate this time; I'm doing a book on space flight), if only NASA can get the thing working.

Of course, “getting the thing working” has been NASA's prime headache for several years. From NASA's viewpoint—at least its public viewpoint—the endless problems boil down to a question of money and management. That's only partly true. The whole story is much more complex and interesting. This is a good time to look at it, while there still is a manned space program. After this spring it may be dead, killed along with two astronauts a few seconds after T=0, killed by money and management and a confluence of interesting forces; technological, historical, social.

Now, no junkie with class supports his habit by knocking over filling stations and such. What you do is tell all your friends how great the stuff is, get them addicted, and then sell it to them. I've been supporting my space habit this way for some years, and I'm not about to change my ways tonight. But I'm a story-teller by trade, and there's a grand story to be told here, full of heroes and villains, at least one assassin, conspiracies, wisdom, stupidity.

We will proceed with little regard for chronology, skipping from future to past and back again. First let's talk about abortions—the mechanical kind rather than the medical. Thumb on the red button. Bailing out.

Unlike the Russians, we've never lost an astronaut in flight. This hasn't been due to luck. It's because we've never been guilty of the “You can't send a boy up in a crate like that!” syndrome. Not only because our flight systems have been thoroughly tested first, both in scale models and in full-sized but unmanned dry runs, but also because we've paid scrupulous attention to abort procedures, their mechanical aspects failsafed and redundant through all stages of a mission, the pilots trained to a fare-thee-well in what to do if something goes blooie.

(The early Russian cosmonauts, by contrast, were little more than passengers, stuck in a tin can with an oxygen bottle. Their first female cosmonaut's main qualification was that she belonged to a skydiving club.)

The space shuttle has three distinct abort procedures, each having to do with a loss of thrust in the main engine—that is to say, you've already gotten up past the stratosphere and jettisoned the solid-fuel boosters, and how much thrust you can squeeze out of the thing determines whether you try to make it back to the Cape, or swing through a short-life orbit and come down in New Mexico or some other emergency landing site.

But the main engine is the baby of the three. What about those two solid-fueled monsters? To quote the apologetic language of
Aviation Week & Space Technology:
“Most malfunctions of the Thiokol solid rocket boosters are basically considered to be unsurvivable emergencies.”

In other words: “Here's the plan. Suppose one of the solid-fuel boosters fails. The plan is, you die.”

During the first few tests, the astronauts will be equipped with ejection seats, but they are not, again quote, “a viable escape mechanism” on the pad, nor for the first fifty feet of altitude. Nor are they of any use after the vehicle attains Mach 3, which it does while the boosters are still blasting.

But the possibility of blowing up on the pad is only the most dramatic, and we hope a very unlikely, event among the universe of things that could go wrong on the first flight.

Nothing like the space shuttle has ever tried to fly before. You have four attached aircraft, essentially; one with wings, three of them blasting away with millions of pounds of thrust through subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic speeds. The orbiter will break all speed records for winged craft within four minutes of flight—and triple its own record before it leaves the atmosphere.

No mathematical model exists to predict exactly what the flow of air is going to do to that ungainly machine as it accelerates from zero to hypersonic. And no
physical
model was built, because NASA didn't have the money. No unmanned flight test is possible because the bird simply can't be trusted to fly without a real-time pilot. Who may die when high-speed turbulence shakes the whole conglomeration to pieces. At least one Apollo astronaut has declared publicly that he wouldn't fly the thing, not the first time.

So how did this happen? Aren't space ships supposed to be sleek graceful things? Sure, they're built by committees—but the shuttle is the first one that
looks
it.

To understand why, we can follow various threads of history that pass through one point in space and time: the aforementioned VIP viewing area at Cape Kennedy in July, 1969. There were some interesting people there—like the only surviving American slave, Charlie Smith, who thought it was all a waste of time. President Nixon couldn't make it, too busy with his tape recorders and things, but Spiro Agnew was there. And an old man who started out as a school-teacher in Transylvania: Hermann Oberth.

Oberth was the only one of the three early rocket pioneers who lived long enough to be there when Apollo 11 blasted off to put men on the surface of another world. He was also, curiously, the one most directly related to that rocket's genealogy, by way of Adolf Hitler.

Here's a quick gloss of the history of modern rocketry. The other two pioneers were Konstantin Tsiolkovski, a Russian, and Robert Goddard, an American. The three men, working independently over a couple of decades, all came up with the notion that liquid-fueled rockets could be used to escape the Earth's gravity. What made Oberth's 1923 book,
The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space
, the most important was that Wernher von Braun read it.