Voyage (62 page)

He got some sympathy from Joe Muldoon. The scores went through a rethink which helped Columbia a little.

But in the end Muldoon’s final report to Tim Josephson followed the scoring conclusions: ‘Rockwell International is considered the outstanding source as the Mars Excursion Module prime contractor …’

His assignment completed, Gershon went off to work at the Cape on the first of the Ares A-class missions, an unmanned proving flight of the upgraded Saturn VB.

In a couple of days he was called back to JSC to put his paw print to the final MEM report. Gershon turned up, pretty pissed with the whole thing.

Muldoon caught him up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘It’s over, isn’t it? Oh, come on, Joe. You know as well as I do that Columbia were the only outfit with a real chance of building something in the timescale. And now we’re dumping them.’

‘Of course I know that. But it’s not over yet.’

‘Are you kidding me? We’ve just signed off the final report, for Christ’s sake. Columbia never had a chance.’

‘You’re learning fast, boy, but you’ve got a long way to go. In this game, a signed-off, final report is just the start of the negotiations.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want you to do something for me.’

A couple of days after that, a long telegram landed on JK Lee’s gun-metal desk.

He called in Jack Morgan, and flipped the telegram across the desk at him.

Morgan read through the thing carefully, but he kept one eye on Lee as he did so.

The telegram had come from Ralph Gershon, one of the astronauts on the Evaluation Board. It was basically a list of questions about the Columbia bid. A lot of them were brutal, and the first was a doozie: translated from corporate speak it was,
How can a piss-ant bunch of amateurs like Columbia handle the development of a major spacecraft like the MEM?

‘Well, I guess this is it,’ Morgan said, studying Lee. ‘We’re dead.’

Morgan had never seen Lee so low as in the last couple of months, since the MEM presentation. The release of tension, the sleep deficit, and all the rest of it had dumped Lee into a deep, deep trough of depression. And Lee’s overspend on the proposal had finally come out into the open, and there was a lot of muttering against him within Columbia. During the MEM exercise Morgan had become genuinely worried about what Lee was doing to himself. Not to mention his family. Now the MEM thing was over Morgan knew he was going to have to broach the health thing with Lee, somehow. Maybe he’d try to work through Jennine.

But right now Lee, sitting back in his chair, seemed bright, alert, and his eyes had that slightly glazed, almost
high
look in them that Morgan had come to associate with Lee’s major bursts of activity.

‘Hell, no,’ Lee said vehemently. ‘Don’t you get it? This damn note means we’re still in the running. They wouldn’t be asking us these questions otherwise.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Get the answers, of course.’ Lee stabbed at his intercom. ‘Bella.
I want you to start putting out calls. Get the MEM team leaders in here, as soon as you can. And book a flight for us all, out to Houston, for – let me think – two days’ time.’

‘But that’s a Sunday, JK.’

‘Here you go again with your “but but but,”’ Lee said. ‘I’ve told you about that before.’

‘Yes, sir, JK.’

Morgan was aghast. ‘You’re not serious. It’s unheard of for a bidder to make a personal visit during an evaluation process.’

‘What is that, a rule?’

‘An unwritten one, I guess.’

Lee arched his eyebrows. ‘Imagine my concern.’

After the visit of the Columbia people to JSC, the scoring was revised again, and the senior people on the Evaluation Board took the proposal to Tim Josephson in Washington.

Muldoon’s people recommended Rockwell on the basis of the scoring system, with Columbia finally showing up at third.

The Administrator listened carefully.

Then Josephson thanked the Board, and he asked Joe Muldoon, Ralph Gershon and a couple of others to stay behind.

‘Tell me the truth.’ His tone sounded to Gershon typically dry and bureaucratic. ‘Are there any factors, other than those presented by the Evaluation Board, which I ought to take into account in this decision?’

Joe Muldoon spoke up. ‘Hell, yes. You got to look again at the Columbia bid, Tim.’

‘Why so?’

‘Because in my opinion it’s the most technically plausible. It’s shallow in some areas, but overall it was the most coherent of the bids. With the support of good subcontractors, the small organizational weight of Columbia won’t be a handicap …’

Gershon tried not to grin. As he’d watched Muldoon and Josephson and the rest work in the last few days, he’d come to believe that running an organization had a lot in common with flying a plane. You had to use your instruments, sure, but raw data, however well interpreted and analyzed, was only one input; in the end – when you had to make the decisions that could save you or kill you – there was no substitute for the mysterious internal processing that amalgamated data and experience and the
feel
of a ship in your hands.

It was just what Tim Josephson and Joe Muldoon were doing
now, he thought. The Columbia bid
felt
right, and that might swing it for JK Lee, even yet.

Still, it was going to be difficult for Josephson to set aside the conclusions of his formal evaluation. Two decades earlier Jim Webb had done that, when he’d plumped for Rockwell to build Apollo. And there had been muttering about corruption and back-hand deals ever since.

When Gershon left to take a plane to the Cape, the decision still hung in the balance.

Lee was getting steadily more depressed. Even though his unorthodox visit to Houston had gone well, the rumors coming out of Washington were strong and consistent: that Rockwell had the MEM contract wrapped up.
Hell,
he thought,
they always did. Who was I ever trying to kid?

At ten a.m. on the day after getting back from Houston he found himself staring out of his office window. He was thinking of going home. He could spend some rime with Jennine. And his son, Bert, was playing baseball that evening for his high school team. Maybe it would be good for Lee to show up, for once.

Then Joe Muldoon called.

‘Can you come back over to Houston today?’

Lee was nonplussed. ‘I don’t know. The flights –’

‘Tonight would be fine. I’d like to see you. Come to my office at JSC.’

Maybe Muldoon thought it would be kinder to tell Lee in person, even if it meant dragging him all the way out to Houston.

Lee thought of Bert and his ball game. That seemed a more attractive option.

He called Bella to ask her to fix up a flight to Houston.

He got to JSC in late afternoon. He’d spent the flight, and the ride from the airport, bracing himself for the axe.

Muldoon took him into his office and closed the door. He stuck out his hand and grinned. ‘Congratulations. I wanted to tell you in person. You’ve won the MEM.’

Lee, for once in his life, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

‘Can I tell my people?’

Muldoon checked his watch, a heavy astronaut’s Rolex. ‘We can’t make a public announcement until the stock markets close … Well, what the hell.’

He allowed Lee to make two phone calls.

Lee used the phone in Muldoon’s office. He thought of calling Jennine.

He called Art Cane.

And then he called Gene Tyson, at Hughes, and he took a lot of pleasure over commiserating with him.

Muldoon took Lee out that night, for a meal and a good few cold ones. Lee got thoroughly oiled, and had a hell of a time.

But by five a.m. he was up, watching the early-morning news on the TV, and packing his overnight bag.

He caught a glance of himself in the mirror on the wall of his motel room. ‘By God,’ he said aloud. ‘I’m going to build a spacecraft to take three Americans to Mars.’

Then the TV news item broke into his awareness.

A Saturn VB had blown up. There was an image of a white cloud, tinged with orange, with Solid Rocket Boosters veering crazily out of it, trailing smoke.

The commentators said the accident would set the Ares program back years.

My God
. Lee knotted his tie, his fingers frantic, fumbling, and hurried from the room.

… Today the last remains of the tragic Apollo-N space mission have been buried, in an underground storage facility at NASA’s Cape Kennedy launch site in Florida.

I spoke to Aaron Raab at the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center about the problems involved. Raab was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1946. He joined NASA in July 1967, just a few months after another tragedy, the Apollo 1 pad fire which claimed the lives of astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee.

In the immediate aftermath of the Apollo-N disaster, Raab shouldered the heavy burden of ‘Debris Manager.’

After being offloaded from its recovery vessel at Port Canaveral, the Apollo-N Command Module – the eleven-thousand-pound capsule which returned NASA astronauts Dana, Jones and Priest to Garth – was painstakingly disassembled and laid out for investigation purposes in temporary storage areas by a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team. Under Raab’s supervision, and under the watchful eye of the investigating Commission appointed by President Reagan, the components of the Command Module
were arranged in their original configuration relative to one another, to assist the investigators. The components remained in this ‘footprint’ for almost a full year, because once the investigations were over and the reports written, NASA got down to its own internal engineering evaluation and data retrieval.

Surprisingly little equipment was used to move the components about, including a light crane, a fork-lift, and two flatbed trucks.

Because the Command Module had been recovered from the salt-water ocean, some of it required corrosion-proofing to preserve it. In addition, special measures were taken to protect Apollo-N’s voice recorders. Soon after recovery the recorders were sent to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for restoration by IBM and analysis by a team led by woman astronaut Natalie York.

The Command Module’s final resting place is perhaps bizarre, but practical. The spacecraft now lies deep underground in a disused Minuteman missile silo complex in a quiet corner of Cape Canaveral. The chosen site consists of one silo (Complex 31) and four vault-like underground equipment rooms.

The operation to prepare the silo as a final resting place was a tricky one. The silo complex had deteriorated badly after some ten years of neglect. The equipment rooms still housed a considerable amount of electronic equipment associated with missile operations, which Raab’s team had to remove before the Apollo-N debris could be transported in. Other modifications were made to transform the underground equipment rooms, which were in a bad state of repair, into permanent storage vaults. Although there was to be no environmental control, the underground facilities had to be made at least watertight; it turned out that back in the late 1960s a burst pipe had immersed the floor of Complex 31 under several feet of water, and so the water lines were all capped off before the Apollo-N debris was moved in.

There was extensive photo-documentation by NASA cameramen, and the whole operation was conducted under a tight security cordon, with round-the-clock surveillance to deter morbid souvenir hunters.

‘We got the components in the vault in a very organized manner,’ Aaron Raab told me. ‘We compartmentalized the components according to function and storage requirements. Primarily, we put in the larger components first, and anything we felt would be of any significance in the future was left in an accessible area. It was all logged in by our quality control personnel here at the Cape, in
official logbooks. These record precisely where each component is stored.’

It would be a fairly involved operation for anyone to get back into the vault, but future investigators could go in and retrieve components after a few days of clearing work. But, says Raab, there are no plans for the periodic opening-up of the vaults to check the condition of the stored wreckage.

Today, I watched as Aaron Raab personally laid the last few poignant components of the Command Module in position. A huge ten-ton concrete cap was secured with long steel rods, and welded down over the underground vault.

A year after the accident, Apollo-N is at last laid to rest …

At first Bert Seger had been enthusiastic about his new post in Washington. He was, after all, given the rank of Associate Administrator, and, as a senior manager in the Office of Manned Spaceflight, he still expected to have a strong hands-on involvement in the manned program. But when he studied the new organization charts, and he saw just how far away from him were the reporting lines of the major players, like Joe Muldoon, he started to realize he’d been had. He’d been handed a sinecure, something to get him decently out of the way during the investigations into Apollo-N.

He never became comfortable at Headquarters. He had a few assignments, and some pet projects of his own to pursue, and they filled his time, but not his attention. He would find himself sitting alone in his office for hours on end, waiting for the telephone to ring, reading newspapers.

He took long walks around Washington.

He found favored benches in the big public gardens, and floated through the museums. He liked the serenity, the timelessness of the museums.

The evenings weren’t any better.

Fay was still in Houston, with the boys, and Seger would fly back there every Friday. Fay didn’t want to move, because of the boys’ schooling, and Seger accepted that, reluctantly.

Every Sunday or Monday, when he had to get ready to fly back to DC, Fay prepared him a little bouquet of carnations. Each day
he’d take one for his buttonhole, but they’d be pretty faded by the end of the week, and it just wasn’t the same.

He had too much time to think.

He kept on going over the events of that flight – in fact, over everything he’d done in all the years that had led up to Apollo-N.