Voyage (20 page)

Extract from Understanding Signed by President Richard M. Nixon and Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers A. N. Kosygin. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1972 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1972)

Ben Priest called her after midnight.

‘It’s over, Natalie. I thought you’d like to know. We lost Mariner.’

She sat up in bed. ‘Oh? How come?’

‘They’d just taken more images of Tharsis and Syrtis Major, and the pictures were on the tape; but then Mariner had to position itself to point its high-gain antenna at Earth to play back the pictures, and – zippo. Nothing. Out of attitude gas. So we lost fifteen pictures.

‘But what
really
pisses me,’ he growled into the phone, ‘is that Mariner still has fuel on board; it’s just in the wrong place – in the retro-rocket tanks, not the attitude control tanks. We could have run tubes to carry the retro stuff to the attitude control jets. If we’d done that we might have another year of useful life out of Mariner.’

‘But …’

‘But it would have cost another thirty thousand bucks. Out of a hundred million dollar mission. So we didn’t do it.’

‘Oh, well, Ben. I guess nobody figured that Mariner would last so long anyhow. The basic mission plan was only ninety days.’

‘Maybe. But if I’d known, I’d have paid up the thirty grand myself. And then the fuckers axed Viking!’

She had to laugh. ‘Come on, Ben. This isn’t like you. You’re the great Man-In-Space hero. That thirty thousand bucks has probably gone to pay your salary anyhow.’ That was basically true; the unmanned scientific exploration of Mars had been scaled right back, with the savings being pulled into the manned effort.

‘Well, I sometimes get my sense of priority back, Natalie. It’s not the lost year that bugs me, you know; it’s just those fifteen pictures. There they are, sitting on that tape, even now …

‘We had to send up a last command. To make Mariner turn off its radio transmitter.’

Oh, God. The poor, brave little probe
. She pushed her pillow
against her face until she was sure she wouldn’t guffaw. After all, it was only a couple of days since she’d called Ben in a similar mood herself, after an evening spent poring over the latest polls showing Nixon heading for a landslide over McGovern. ‘How long before Mariner’s orbit decays?’

‘Oh, fifty years.’

‘Well, maybe we’ll have a manned mission by then. You’ll get there yourself, Ben. Maybe you’ll be able to retrieve your pictures. And maybe pick up the old spacecraft itself; who knows?’

She heard him laugh. ‘Sure. Why, we’ll bring it back and hang it up in the Smithsonian where it belongs.’

‘What next for you, Ben?’

She heard him sigh. ‘Apollo-N. The test flights for the NERVA. Some time in Tomorrowland.’

‘At least you and Mike might get to see more of each other. Maybe I’ll see more of the two of you, in fact.’

‘Perhaps. But the flights are looking a long way off, Natalie.’

‘Now I think I ought to get some sleep, Ben.’

‘Okay. Goodnight, Natalie.’

‘Yeah. You too, Ben.’

She lay in the darkness, wide awake.

Mike wasn’t here, of course, or anywhere within five hundred miles of her. He was losing himself in the NERVA developments. As Ben had hinted, that damned project was slipping again.

Anyway, she realized, things hadn’t been quite the same between the two of them since that day in 1969 when she’d gone out to Jackass Flats with Mike and Ben.

She’d tried to talk this through with Mike. It had gone beyond a simple argument for her, beyond the kind of sparky debating exercise they’d enjoyed so many times in the past. NERVA seemed to symbolize, to her, a lot of her unease about the way her country was being run. And eventually that seemed to get through to Mike. Impatiently, he’d shown her schemes to trap the hydrogen venting, to bury the expended cores more deeply …

Somehow that didn’t help. Obviously Mike was smart enough to understand the issues that concerned her, but it was pretty clear he didn’t
care
; not as much as he cared about a successful project, anyhow.

She loved Mike. She believed. And he loved her. But, she thought, their disparate lives, their different perspectives over the value of projects like NERVA, all of it was steadily pulling them apart.

They’d gone out to Jackass Flats, she recalled, just six months after they’d met. And that was all of three years ago. Maybe she should start regarding those first happy six months as the anomaly, not the norm.

Meanwhile, in March – four months into Mariner’s orbital survey – the first detailed maps of Mars had begun to appear from the US Geological Survey people, at Flagstaff. York had got hold of copies of these, and pored over them.

Mars was very different from what anyone had expected.

Mars was asymmetrical. The whole of the southern hemisphere was swollen, the land lifted well above the datum level, and heavily cratered. The northern hemisphere was mostly below the datum, and was a lot smoother than the south … but the north had Tharsis.

Tharsis was a bulge in the planet the size of southern Africa. It was as if a quarter of the whole surface of Mars had been lifted up by some colossal event. The bulge was surrounded by an array of cracks and grooves: to the east of Tharsis, in the Coprates region, a huge canyon system stretched nearly a quarter of the way around the circumference of the planet.

The ancient cratered terrain in the south was cut by gullies and channels which seemed to have been incised by running water. York was entranced by images of Moon-like craters, eroded by flash floods. But there was no sign of water on the surface now, in the quantities needed to cut the gullies; maybe the water had escaped from the atmosphere, or was trapped under the surface.

It was this that intrigued her about Mars, she’d decided, this mix of exposed, lunar terrain and Earth-like weathering, a combination that made up an extraordinary world: neither Earthlike nor lunar, but uniquely Martian.

But it had nothing to do with her.

The work she was doing, she’d long realized, was building up into an unspectacular, if solid, career. She was becoming just another rock hound: her future was probably in commercial geology, and would be spent in messy oil fields, or mines. She could expect a life of heat, cold, rattlesnakes, cow pies, poison oak …

The prospect left her pole-axed with boredom.

She never got to see Mike. She wasn’t interested in her work. And, meanwhile, she spent her spare time imagining geologic traverses across the ancient, battered surface of Mars.

What it amounted to, she told herself with brutal frankness, was that her personal life had been on hold for, hell, years. Just like her professional life.

She felt a germ of a new resolution somewhere inside her, like a dust mote around which a new future might crystalize.

I got to get closer to this Mars stuff. And not for Mike, not even for Ben Priest. For me
.

There might be a way. Maybe she could transfer into the Space Sciences Laboratory, right here at Berkeley, that big white building on top of Grizzly Peak.

She got out of bed, dug out her loose-leaf folder of Mars photos, and began to study the eroded craters again.

Phil Stone was the first to understand Seger’s suggestion.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘You’re going to send us to the Moon. Aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’m considering. I want to reassign your mission a Saturn V, and send you to lunar orbit.’

Chuck Jones stared at Seger, astonishment crinkling up his squat face. ‘Like hell you will.’

For long seconds, the three of them sat in silence.

Stone felt stunned; here in this sterile, mundane office, on an ordinary Thursday morning, it was impossible to absorb such news.

Skylab B, the second Earth-orbital Saturn Wet Workshop, was to have been Stone’s first flight into space. He’d already been training on the science and operational aspects of the mission for months. And now Seger was thinking of changing it all around, and sending him to the Moon? Jesus.

Seger played with the carnation in his lapel. ‘You got to look at the bigger picture. The NERVA is slipping again, so its program of test flights is being cut. And that’s freed up a Saturn V. And we need to use it, or we’ll lose it. And I want to use it to send you boys to lunar orbit.’

Stone frowned. ‘It’s a man-rated Saturn V, for God’s sake. It’s already built. How can we lose it?’

Seger shrugged. ‘We may have built the thing, but we haven’t yet spent the money to make it fly.’

‘We can’t go to the fucking Moon,’ Chuck Jones said. ‘We’re still waiting on the J-2S.’ Lunar orbital workshops were planned, but a few years down the road, following extensive modifications
to the S-IVB: the upgraded J-2S main engine, additional payload capacity, a self-ullaging system, electrical heating blankets and mylar insulation, additional batteries, upgraded electronics … ‘The fucking S-IVB doesn’t have the power to inject itself into lunar orbit.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t need to. Look at this.’ Seger had a glossy presentation on his desk; he handed them copies.

Stone looked quickly. It was a summary of an old McDonnell-Douglas study called LASSO –
Lunar Applications on a Spent S-IVB Stage (Orbital)
. It showed how Saturn components could be used to establish lunar orbit workshops of varying complexity and weight. It was full of cutaway isometric diagrams and color pictures and big bold bullet-point blocks of text, and – naturally, as it came from the manufacturers of the S-IVB – it was relentlessly optimistic: some of the projected dates were already in the past.

‘Look at Baseline 1.’ Seger pointed to sections of the presentation. ‘That shows how we can take a workshop to lunar orbit
without
the J-2S upgrade, or any of the rest of it …’

A Saturn V would be launched looking superficially like those for the Apollo landing flights. But instead of a Lunar Module, the booster would carry an airlock module, fixed to the front of the third stage.

The S-IVB would send the spacecraft toward the Moon. Just like the landing missions. But, once exhausted, the third stage wouldn’t be discarded. The Apollo would decouple and dock with the empty stage via the airlock adapter. The stack would follow a long, lower-energy trajectory to the Moon: a day and a half more than the three-day landing flights. Then the Apollo Service Module’s main engine would be used to brake the whole stack into lunar orbit.

The empty stage would have the same weight and dynamic characteristics, roughly, as a loaded LM. So an Apollo would indeed be able to deliver it to lunar orbit. The only modifications needed for the S-IVB would be the usual passivation and neutralization kit – equipment to turn the stage from a dry fuel can into a working station – and equipment brackets and pallets. Enough supplies could be carried for a four-week stay in lunar orbit, and the station would be refurbished for later crews.

As he read, Stone began to see the feasibility of it. It could, he realized, be done.
But …

‘Why?’

Jones looked up from his own reading; Seger fixed Stone with a glare.

‘Why what?’

‘Why are we doing this, Bert? It’s just a stunt. We’ll have to cut out so much to save weight we’ll be compromising a lot of our science objectives for Skylab B.’

‘I know about the science, Phil. But we can send all that stuff up on the second crew flight, can’t we? And your flight will simply turn into a more limited engineering trip, with less emphasis on the science.’ Seger was a thin, intense man, with black, slicked-back hair and an Irish darkness; Stone found him unnerving. ‘If you’re in my chair, Phil, you have to look at the benefits for the program
as a whole
. Beyond your one mission alone. Yes, it will be a stunt. But a hell of a stunt. It will put us right back on top of everything …’

Jones talked now about the training they’d already completed toward their Earth-orbital mission. ‘And what about the Russians?’ The Soviets were proposing to dock a Soyuz ship with Skylab B in Earth orbit. ‘Changing that stunt around to a lunar-orbit rendezvous mission is a hell of a trick,’ Jones said. ‘I mean, the Russkies haven’t lifted a single cosmonaut out of Earth orbit yet.’

‘The Soviets still say they’ll have at least a circumlunar capability in a couple of years – within the life of the station,’ Seger said. ‘So we can get around that. And even if we can’t, maybe we could downgrade the Russian thing into a simple dock with an Apollo in Earth orbit. Anyhow, never mind the damn Russians. Chuck, you’ll be hanging out over the edge. Fitting out a station in lunar orbit. Nobody’s done anything remotely like that before. I thought a challenge might appeal.’

Jones looked thoughtful.

Stone knew Seger was pressing the right buttons, as far as Jones was concerned. The thought depressed him.

Stone could see Seger’s point, to some extent. Morale in NASA had been low, paradoxically, since the Mars decision. A lot of staff had been geared up to the abandoned Space Shuttle program, which they’d seen as new and exciting, technically; by comparison, the Skylabs looked like an extension of 1963 state-of-the-art. And the continuing budget cuts had put endless pressure on the Agency’s ambitions.

If you counted contract staff, only a hundred thousand people were still working on space programs, compared to a peak of half a million during Apollo. There had even been a program of terminations, at Houston, Marshall and the other main centers.

Meanwhile NASA had run into a lot of flak over the first orbital workshop, Skylab A. Pete Conrad had led the first set-up mission
to open up Skylab. But then the second crew had been military, a consolation for the DoD after the Shuttle cancelation. Ken Mattingly, an Apollo veteran, had led a crew of military astronauts – Manned Spaceflight Engineers – through a secretive program testing ‘Terra Scout’ and ‘Battleview’ surveillance equipment, radiation monitoring gear, encrypted communications beams. Every previous NASA flight had been completely open; it had been a deliberate and popular policy going back to Kennedy.