Voyage (11 page)

A little after noon he reached Hampton: his home town, right at the tip of the Peninsula. It was a fishing town, a backwater. He drove down streets so familiar it seemed his memories had reached out to reconstruct an external world. Here were the same shabby boatyards, the crab boats lolling in the brackish tidal flow, the gulls: all the symbols of his childhood, still in place. It was as if twelve years had rolled off him, taking away all his achievements – Mary and the kids, the Academy, his USAF service – leaving him a scraped-raw ten-year-old again.

Men had walked on the Moon. And the thinkers of the Langley Research Center, just a few miles to the north, had played a key role in putting them there, Dana’s father Gregory included. But it all seemed to have made damn little difference to Hampton.

Both his parents came out onto the porch to greet him. The house’s windows gleamed, the porch was swept until it shone, and the wind-chimes glittered in the fresh blue daylight. But the little wooden-framed house had an air of shabbiness about it, and the downtown neighborhood seemed to have got rougher than ever. Dana felt a certain claustrophobia settling over him, like an old, ill-fitting coat.

His mother, Sylvia, was rounder, older, her face more tired and slack than he remembered, but she was lit up by a smile of such intensity that Dana felt obscurely guilty. And here came his father, Gregory Dana, in an old cardigan and with tie loosely knotted, wiping his hands on an oily rag. It was hard to see Gregory’s eyes through his dusty wire-rimmed spectacles –
John Lennon glasses,
Dana realized suddenly, and he suppressed a grin.

Gregory shook Dana’s hand. ‘So how’s the great astronaut coming along?’

Gregory had asked that question as long as Dana could remember. The difference now was it looked as if the question might soon have some bearing on the truth.

Lunch was a stiff affair. His parents had always been a little awkward with him, undemonstrative in their affections. So he talked about Mary, the children, how much they’d appreciated the presents they’d been sent for their recent birthdays: the Revell Saturn V
rocket kit which had been much too advanced for two-year-old Jake, the hand-knitted sweater for Maria.

When lunch was done, Gregory Dana tucked his tobacco pouch into the pocket of his shabby gray cardigan. ‘Well, Jimmy. How’s about a little Brain-Busting, back in the shop?’

Dana’s mother gave him a glistening nod. It was okay, she’d be fine.

‘Sure, Dad.’

The workshop, so called, was actually a small unused bedroom at the back of the house, filled with tools and books and bits of unfinished models, a blackboard coated with obscure, unreadable equations.

Dana cleared some loose sketches from a stool. His slacks were already coated with a patina of fine dust. Every surface was covered with scraps of paper, chewed-off pencils, shreds of tobacco, bits of discarded models. Gregory had always banned Sylvia from doing any cleaning in here. As Dana had grown a little older he’d done a certain amount to keep down the level of detritus and mire; but since he’d left home it looked as if the shop hadn’t been cleaned out once.

His father began to bustle about the workshop, pulling together obscure bits and pieces from the clutter, sorting haphazardly. Gregory puffed at his pipe as he worked, quite content, and the rich, seductive scent of burning tobacco filled the room, evoking sharp memories in Dana.

On Sunday afternoons, Gregory had often taken Dana out to the meadows alongside Langley’s airfield, and there they would join other Langley engineers in flying their model airplanes and rockets – made not from kits, but in ramshackle home workshops just like Gregory’s, here. It had been terrific for Dana to be out there on a wind-blown afternoon, with these gangling, noisy eccentrics – the Brain Busters, they called themselves, isolated from the Hampton locals, who scorned them.

To Dana as a boy of eight or nine, to be able to work at Langley on airplanes and spaceships had seemed the best possible future in the world.

‘So,’ Gregory said without looking at him, ‘where’s the next assignment?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s most likely going to be Edwards.’ Down in the Mojave Desert, the USAF’s premium flight test station.

‘Will you fly there?’

‘Maybe. Well, probably. But not the most advanced planes.’

‘And,’ Gregory said levely, ‘is that likely to be your long-term posting?’

‘Nothing is long-term, Dad. You know that.’ It was a question he was asked every time he came home.

Gregory’s face was soft, round, a little jowly; his thin hair was plastered over a dome of skull. ‘It’s your mother. She gets concerned. I –’

‘Dad,’ Dana said, ‘I’m not a combat pilot. You shouldn’t worry about such things. I’m not going to Nam. I’m aiming for the space program, not Nam. I don’t know how many times I have to –’

‘Can you get to be an astronaut, out of Edwards?’

Dana took a breath. ‘Sure. In fact, Edwards’s day might be coming,’ he said. ‘The studies are coming in for the Space Shuttle. That will lean heavily on the old lifting-body research that was performed at Edwards. And there is talk of having the Shuttle land at Edwards. Gliding down from space, to land right on the old salt flats.’

Gregory grunted. ‘
If
the Shuttle goes ahead. The studies are also going ahead for Martian landing missions. And
there
we are looking at more big dumb rockets. More V-2s.’

Dana grinned. ‘Those Germans, Dad?’

‘It’s the crudity of their approach that galls me. Von Braun’s designs have always looked the same. For thirty years! Immense, overpowered machines! Leaping to the stars, by the most direct route possible!’

‘The Germans got a man on the Moon,’ Dana said gently.

‘Of course. But it’s not
elegant.’

Not elegant. And that’s not the Langley Way
.

Gregory was saying, ‘Even the basic thinking about interplanetary travel has hardly advanced since Jules Verne.’

Dana guffawed. ‘Oh, come on, Dad; that’s hardly fair.’ The lunar voyagers of Jules Verne’s nineteenth-century science fiction had been fired at the Moon out of a huge cannon, situated in Florida. ‘Even Verne could have worked out that the gun’s acceleration would have creamed his travelers against the walls of their projectile.’

Gregory waved his pipe. ‘Oh, of course. But that’s just a detail. Look – Verne launched his travelers with an impulse: a shock, a blow, imparted by his cannon. After that brief moment, the spacecraft followed an elongated orbit about the Earth, without any means of directing itself.

‘And just so with Apollo. Our great rockets, the Saturns of von
Braun, work for only minutes, in a flight lasting days. Effectively they apply an impulse to the craft. Even the Mars studies follow the same principles. Here – look here.’

Gregory walked to the blackboard and wiped it clean with the sleeve of his sweater. He rummaged in his cardigan pocket until he dug out a fluffy piece of chalk, and he drew two concentric circles on the board. ‘Here are the orbits of Earth and Mars. Every object in the Solar System follows an orbit around the sun: ellipses, flattened circles, of one eccentricity or another.

‘How are we to travel from Earth, on this inner track, to Mars, on the outer? We do not have the technology to fire our rockets for extended periods. We can only apply impulses, hopping from one elliptical path to another, as if jumping between moving streetcars. And so we must patch together our trajectory, to Mars and back, from fragments of ellipse. We kick and we coast; kick and coast. Like so …’

Dana watched as his father sketched, and thought about Langley.

The Samuel P. Langley Memorial Laboratory was the oldest aeronautical research center in the US, and it was father to all the rest. It had been founded during the First World War, conceived out of a fear that the land of the Wright brothers might start to fall behind the European belligerents in aviation. It had been a different world, a world in which the individualistic traditions of old America were still strong, and there was a great suspicion of falling into the emerging technocratic ways of the totalitarian powers of Europe.

Langley stayed poor, humble and obscure, but it succeeded in keeping abreast of the latest technology. And back then – Gregory had told Jim – Hampton was a place where people still referred to the Civil War as ‘the late war.’

Gregory had often taken Jim around Langley. The Research Center was a cluster of dignified old buildings, with precise brickwork and extensive porches, that looked almost like a college campus. But, set amongst the neatly trimmed lawns and tree-shaded streets, there were exotic shapes: huge spheres, buildings from which protruded pipes twenty or thirty feet wide. These were Langley’s famous wind tunnels.

Jim Dana had come to identify the layout of Langley – the odd mixture of the neatly mundane with the exotic – with the geography of his father’s complex, secretive mind.

Hampton was so isolated that a lot of bright young aeronautical engineers didn’t want to come within a hundred miles of the place.
Those that did come to Langley tended to be highly motivated, and not a little odd – like Gregory himself, Jim had come to realize ruefully. And the local Virginians hadn’t thought much of the ‘Nacka Nuts’ arriving in their midst – as they still called them even now. So the Langley engineers had kept themselves to themselves most of the time, on and off the job, and Langley had evolved into its own peculiar little world.

As Dana had grown and moved away, he’d become aware of the bigger world beyond Virginia.

‘I don’t know why you stay here,’ he’d once told his father. ‘All the real action in NASA is at other sites. Why don’t you ever think about moving away?’ He couldn’t figure his father’s lack of ambition.

‘Because things don’t get any better for people like me than they are here,’ Gregory had replied. ‘The press don’t care much about Langley. Even the rest of NASA doesn’t care much. To the outsider, the place is just a set of gray buildings with gray people working slide rules and writing out long equations on blackboards. But if you’re in love with aeronautical research, it’s a kind of heaven – a unique and wonderful place.’

Jim knew that Langley had made immense contributions to the US’s prowess in aeronautics and astronautics. It had got involved with the development of military aircraft during the Second World War and then in the programs which led to the first supersonic airplane, the Bell X-1. Langley staff had formed the task force which had been responsible for the Mercury program, and later it got involved with studies for the optimal shapes for the Gemini and Apollo ships …

Gregory never talked about his past. Dana knew he’d suffered during the war. Maybe, he thought, Langley was kind of a refuge, after all that. It buffered him from the pressures of the competitive aircraft industry, and on the other hand from NASA politics. It was as if the men of Langley – and they
were
men, almost exclusively – had made a kind of unconscious decision that their site and budgets and scope should remain small, even as the space program Langley had spawned had grown like Topsy.

Gregory was still only forty-one. But Dana could see, now he’d grown a liitle more, that Gregory had found a place that suited him; and here he was going to stay, getting older and slower, charming everyone with his lingering traces of French accent, working at his own pace inside this peaceful, isolated cocoon.

Staying at Langley meant, though, that Gregory and Sylvia were more or less stuck, here in downtown Hampton, on Gregory’s plateaued-out salary; and here they’d probably have to stay, despite the inexorable decay of the neighborhood …

Gregory had drawn a half-ellipse which touched Earth’s orbit at one extreme, and reached out to kiss Mars’s orbit at the other. ‘Here we have a minimum-energy transfer orbit. It is called a Hohmann ellipse. Any other trajectory requires a greater expenditure of energy than this … To return to Earth, we must follow a similar half-ellipse.’ He moved Mars around perhaps two-thirds of its orbital path, and drew another kissing ellipse, this one out of Mars and inwards toward the Earth. ‘The flight home takes just as long as the flight out, around two hundred and sixty days. And in addition, we must wait all this time at Mars, until Earth and Mars have moved into the right configuration for us to return: for no less than four hundred and eighty days. And so our mission time is a remarkable nine hundred and ninety-seven days: more than two and a half years. Our longest spaceflight to date has been around two
weeks;
we surely can’t contemplate a mission of such magnitude.’

‘And yet, Rockwell are studying just such a mission profile, for NASA,’ Dana said. ‘Chemical technology only. And at Marshall they are looking at nuclear options.’ Nuclear rockets, more powerful, could put ships into shallower, more direct ellipses. ‘The Marshall study is showing journey times of no more than four hundred and fifty days, total …’

‘More big rockets! Huh!’

Dana grinned. ‘Still not
elegant
enough for you, Dad? But where’s the room for elegance in all this? It seems we’re kind of constrained by the laws of celestial mechanics. It’s either Hohmann, or brute force.’

‘Exactly. So the elegant thing to do is wait: wait until we’ve developed a smart engine, like an ion drive, which can
really
cut down the transit times. But that won’t come in my lifetime, and maybe not yours.’

‘Humm.’ Dana took the chalk from his father, and drew more concentric circles. ‘Of course, you didn’t show the full picture here. There are other planets in the system: Venus inside Earth, Jupiter beyond Mars. And the others.’

Gregory scowled. ‘What difference does that make?’

‘I don’t know.’ Dana dropped the fragment of chalk back into his father’s pocket. ‘You’re the specialist.’

‘No, no, this is not my field.’

‘Maybe there is some way to use the other planets, to get to Mars. There are NASA studies going on of a Grand Tour: using the gravity field of Jupiter and the other giant planets to accelerate a probe out to Neptune …’

‘So what are you suggesting? That we fly to Mars via Jupiter? That’s ridiculous. Jupiter is three times as far from the sun as Mars is.’