Magnificent Desolation (26 page)

About four years into their marriage, Bryant informed Lois that he was unhappy with his job, that he had to work too hard at IBM, and that he wanted to get out. Lois was his cheerleader, so she talked with her relatives about Bryant going to work for the family business, and they all agreed that he could come anytime he was ready to join forces. When Bryant quit IBM, however, he accepted a lucrative job with ITT in Brussels, Belgium. The family business could wait.

When Lois’s father began to divide up the publicly traded shares of his enormously prosperous business with his children and grandchildren, Bryant suddenly decided he wanted another child. Unfortunately, Lois later felt that Bryant’s main motive in having a third child was to secure another batch of stock from her family’s business.

Not long after signing on with ITT, Bryant tired of the demanding position and yearned to be free of his work responsibilities. He planned to return to Arizona and join Lois’s family business. But first he wanted to take a seven-month sabbatical to travel on an unusual adventure throughout Europe. He bought a twenty-seven-foot Danish cabin cruiser in Copenhagen that he christened
Explorer I
, and navigated the family through the locks, waterways, and rivers of Germany and France, all the way to the Mediterranean, where they visited the ports along the French Riviera. With two young daughters and a pregnant wife, the boating expedition made for some eventful months
before they returned to Arizona so Bryant could go to work for Lois’s family at Western Savings.

Throughout their marriage, Lois never asked Bryant about their finances, and trusted him completely to handle their investments. They lived well, and Lois enjoyed Phoenix’s social life. They now had three children, with the birth of their only son, Bryant Driggs Cannon in 1962. The family business continued to grow, and Lois’s father continued to bless them with more and more company stock.

Their comfortable life notwithstanding, Bryant seemed once again restless and disgruntled with his job. Lois arranged an introduction for Bryant to work as a managerial vice president overseeing the computer operations at another savings and loan, Great Western in Los Angeles. Although the company’s headquarters was in L.A., Bryant was able to set up the computer center in Santa Ana. The family moved to Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach, Lois’s favorite beach community in Southern California, a place where she had spent many a summer day as a teenager during family vacations.

The Cannon family lived in the idyllic private beach community for nearly ten years, and to Lois it seemed like heaven on earth. Eventually, however, dissension at work caused Bryant to be dissatisfied again. He wanted to quit his job, sell the beachfront home, buy a condominium in Sun Valley, Idaho, and in the meantime tour Europe with the family in a Volkswagen camper. The trip to Europe was the beginning of the end.

It was a turbulent time that caused Lois and the three children to propose with great vigor the idea of buying another home back in Emerald Bay in an attempt to regain a sense of the family life they had once known. Bryant finally acquiesced and purchased a small hillside home to appease them, but was absent much of the time with various excuses. Lois attempted to restore some normalcy. By now the children were in college. But where was Bryant? Where had he disappeared to? When she heard from him in early December, he informed her he was now in Sun Valley, preparing for Christmas with the family.

Instinctively, Lois was concerned and decided to surprise Bryant by
driving to Sun Valley to find out what was going on. When she arrived and inserted her key in the door, it didn’t work. She knocked on the door, and Bryant opened it. “Lois! What are you doing here?” Bryant had no idea that Lois was coming, but then quickly changed his tune. “Come in, come in. Excuse me for a moment, while I make a phone call.” Twenty minutes later a man knocked on the door, and served Lois with divorce papers.

Lois was in shock. But Bryant was adamant. He wanted a divorce before the beginning of the new year, and it was almost Christmas.

When Lois awakened the next morning in a separate bedroom from her husband, she gathered her senses. Instead of arguing about the divorce, she decided to go skiing, determined to have one of the greatest days of her life. As she approached the ski lift, she heard a voice call out to her, “Hey, Lois, come ski with me today.” Lois turned around and saw a tall, handsome man she had met the previous year in Sun Valley. His name was Clint Eastwood.

For the next four days the famous actor picked up Lois each morning, and they skied together all day long. Clint was involved with Sondra Locke at the time, but became a great ski buddy and friend for Lois. His friendship, along with her other good ski buddies, gave a boost to Lois’s morale at this low moment in her life.

Lois and Bryant’s divorce was finalized in 1982. Divorce is difficult enough, but in the aftermath of this life-changing parting, Lois awakened to the reality that throughout the marriage, portions of her fortune and her children’s had been diverted to her former husband’s own purposes, and that he had repeatedly been unfaithful to her. She struggled to regain her confidence and her perky, stylish, enthusiastic self. It wouldn’t be easy.

Despite feeling devastated and disappointed, Lois believed in herself. She was a survivor. She kept reminding herself of the ways she had advised her girlfriends about their problems:
Believe in yourself, put a smile on your face, throw away the problems, walk with your head high, and move on! Think about what a great life can be ahead.

Mustering her stamina to apply this philosophy to herself, Lois
marched stalwartly forward, stylish and smiling, even though she didn’t feel that way inside. She was, however, secure in her finances following the divorce settlement; her stock and each of the children’s stock was valued in the millions of dollars, safely invested in Western Savings. She bolstered her activities and her checkbook by serving as a public-relations figure for her father’s company, and received a small stipend of about $35,000 per year to publicize Western’s real-estate developments in San Clemente and other locations in Southern California.

As her confidence rebounded, she dated frequently, but refused to get seriously involved with any of her suitors. Often she would go outside on the deck of her home in Emerald Bay, and in the peaceful quiet of a starlit night, as the waves of the Pacific lapped gently against the shore, Lois would look up at the moon and stars, and ask, “Please God, send me my Prince Charming. I know he’s out there somewhere.” Lois believed it.

Then one night she went to a party at the Bel Air Bay Club, and met a man who knew a bit about that moon.

   14

W
HILE
L
OIS WAS PLYING THE SLOPES OF
S
UN
V
ALLEY, SKIING
from January to the end of March, I plunged back into my regular activities, trying to promote space exploration. I had an important meeting coming up in which I planned to present my proposals for the Aldrin Mars Cycler, so it was a busy time for me. I had given my first technical paper on the subject to a handful of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Cal Tech in October 1985, just before Lois and I went to Egypt. JPL has been at the forefront of space technology since it created America’s first artificial satellite,
Explorer I
, in 1958. The engineers there encouraged me to develop my presentation further. Consequently, I immersed myself in the project. I never called Lois during those months, and she never called me.

Then, on January 28, 1986, I grieved along with the rest of our nation as I watched the fateful launch of the
Challenger
, NASA’s second space shuttle. The
Challenger
had already flown nine successful missions from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launches had become routine since the shuttle fleet first started flying in 1981. But this
Challenger
flight seemed in trouble from the beginning. It had been delayed several times, and finally lifted off at 11:38 a.m. (EDT). Friends, family, and the world watched in awe as the
Challenger
cleared the launch tower and streaked into the clear blue sky, but no one could see that an
“O-ring” seal in the solid-fuel rocket booster on the
Challengers
right side had failed. The faulty design of the seal, coupled with unusually cold weather, allowed hot gases to leak through the joint. Rocket booster flames were able to pass through the failed seal, enlarging the small hole. These flames then burned through the
Challengers
support bracket that attached the booster to the side of the tank. That booster broke loose and collided with the tank, piercing the tank’s side. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuels from the tank were ignited by the flames of the solid rocket booster, and after being in flight a mere seventy-three seconds, the
Challenger
exploded right before our eyes. Few people who saw the horrific sight can ever forget it, as all seven crew members perished. The commander of the mission was astronaut Dick Scobee, who had been a student at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base during my tenure as commandant. I had been impressed with his flying abilities then. He would be greatly missed.

The tragedy was particularly grievous, since the brave crew members who died included Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who had been chosen from more than 11,000 educators who wanted a chance to participate on a shuttle flight under NASA’s Teacher in Space program. She had taken a yearlong leave of absence from her teaching position to prepare for the mission. Through no fault of her own, NASA’s first attempt to take an ordinary citizen into space had failed abysmally.

The evening of the explosion, President Reagan paid tribute to the fallen astronauts. “The crew of the space shuttle
Challenger
honored us in the way in which they lived their lives. We’ll never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God.”

Manned spaceflight is dangerous and dramatic. When an ambitious mission succeeds, as did the moon landing flight of
Apollo 11
, astronauts like me are hailed as triumphant national heroes for doing our jobs, and the flight directors, contractors, and engineers responsible for
the success are applauded as visionary geniuses. But when a supposedly routine flight, like the January 1986 mission of the
Challenger
, ends in disaster, the accident assumes the proportions of epic tragedy, replete with victims and villains. The
Challenger
incident certainly had its share of both, and as a result, America’s space program was literally grounded until an investigation was conducted into the causes of the disaster. It would be 1988 before the next American shuttle launch.

Leading up to
Challenger
, America had pinned bright hopes on the new shuttle orbiter fleet, with its runway landings and seven-to eight-person capacity, to enable people other than NASA’s professional astronauts to fly into space. In 1982, NASA’s Advisory Council even established a task force to select private citizens for extra seats that might be available on each flight, and applications soon arrived by the scores. In the year before the
Challenger
accident, NASA flew two members of Congress, Senator Jake Garn and Representative Bill Nelson, on two separate shuttle missions, hoping, I’m sure, that they would bring back glowing firsthand accounts of the shuttle program and how taxpayer dollars were being well spent.

James A. Michener, noted author of the book
Space
, which was later made into a thirteen-hour miniseries for television, had conducted a study group and recommended that NASA include teachers and journalists on space shuttle flights. I was quite supportive of that idea, but wanted to take it one step further, allowing on board creative artists, musicians, singers, movie producers, and anyone who could connect to a large segment of the public. One person who genuinely wanted to fly in the space shuttle was my friend, the singer, songwriter, and actor John Denver.

Denver, who had written such hits as “Rocky Mountain High,” “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” was fascinated with space travel. John attended the launch of the first internationally manned spaceflight,
Apollo/Soyuz 1
, as well as the launch of
Apollo/Soyuz 2
, and the landing of the space shuttle. He passed NASA’s physical examination to determine mental and physical fitness needed for space travel, and he became one of the leading candidates
to be the “first civilian in space.” John was planning on writing a song while up in space, but Christa McAuliffe was chosen to make that flight instead. He did, however, get to fly and land the Space Shuttle simulator. An airplane accident took his life before he was able to realize his dream of flying into space. Because of his tremendous support, NASA awarded John its public service medal for helping “increase awareness of space exploration by the people of the world.”

Unfortunately, after Christa McAuliffe died in the 1986
Challenger
accident, NASA lost its nerve for putting civilians into space. In my opinion, barring any accidents, sending somebody like John Denver into space would be much more effective in the long term than putting schoolteachers and journalists into space, as fine as that might be. My reasoning is that artists such as John Denver and others like him reach far more people than do most teachers and journalists. Certainly, I believe in educators, and have spoken at numerous schools in attempts to inspire the next generation of explorers, and I will continue to do so. And of course I know the power that journalists have to get out a message. But to truly touch people where they are, nothing can do it better than a song or a movie or some creative work that lands squarely in the heart. I felt that NASA missed a golden opportunity when they did not include John Denver on a space shuttle mission.

A
S WINTER GAVE
way to spring, there remained an emptiness in my life that could only be filled by one person. I decided to break down and call Lois. Near the end of March, I knew that Lois would be returning to California, and I hoped that she might be willing to see me. I truly missed her. About two days after I thought she might be home, I called and was pleasantly surprised when she answered the phone. Acting just as casual as if our last meeting had ended on a high note, I spoke congenially: “Well, I see you’re home. How would you like to go out tonight?”

Lois hesitated a few moments, but then answered, “Okay!”

At the conclusion of our date that night, I kissed her politely, but
not passionately as we had before. We went out several more times, and I suggested, “Let’s get together more often.”

Lois’s response surprised me. “No, that won’t work,” she said. “I’ll be glad to go out and have a good time once in a while, but if we are to have any other kind of relationship, I require total exclusivity.” She clearly was not going to allow me to break her heart again. “We can still go out, and you can go out with your other friends, and I’ll go out with mine, but I don’t want to get too involved if you plan to date other people as well.”

Something about Lois intrigued me and appealed to me. The woman had class and character. She was unlike so many women that I had dated who spent most of our time fawning over me, or trading on my celebrity. Lois did neither. The basis of any relationship with her, she made clear, was one of equanimity

In May of that year I presented some of my latest ideas regarding my Mars Cycler in NASA’s backyard, when I spoke at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. There was no reason why America, with all its ingenuity, could not begin to plan for lunar and Mars colonies over the next fifteen to twenty-five years. We needed to start thinking about how to get there. No doubt, NASA types in the audience squirmed in discomfort as I readily acknowledged that the Soviets were leading the way to Mars and beyond.

First, I explained my concept of lunar cyclers, spacecraft that travel in a constant orbit between the Earth and the moon, ferrying crews, supplies, and commerce to and from a lunar colony’s research and manufacturing centers. These cyclers would not land, but would transfer personnel and cargo to “ports” placed in low Earth and low moon orbit. The second phase would be to build a port in a low Martian orbit to serve as a staging area for expeditions to the red planet below, or alternatively to land on one of the two Martian moons. For travel to Mars, I had designed my Mars Cycler system to fly in continuous orbits between Earth and Mars, with a 400-ton spacecraft rotating at either end of its long struts to create the centrifugal force necessary to produce an
artificial gravity environment. The outbound trip to Mars would take about five and a half months, while the return leg would last twenty-one months to take advantage of the relative position of the planets and the natural gravity-assist trajectories serving as an orbital transit-way The Mars base itself would be staffed by twenty crew members, with half of them exchanged with each cycler arrival, meaning that each crew member would spend more than four years on the planet. The Mars-orbiting “cycla-port” could be maintained with a crew of as few as six, I told the crowd. I was back to the orbital mechanics I loved from my early days as an astronaut, and it was fueling my enthusiasm. To an audience that had grown bored watching American astronauts orbit the Earth, my words were either revolutionary or sheer lunacy.

M
EANWHILE
, I
WAS
off to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1986. I was accompanied by my youngest son, Andy, who was in the process of earning his master’s degree in science technology and space policy at George Washington University. He would later follow that up with a Ph.D. from UCLA in political science, with a focus on Russia’s space program. Andy spoke fluent Russian, and he had arranged an invitation for me to meet with Raoul Segdev, the head of Russia’s equivalent of our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I talked to Segdev about my cycler orbits, and the idea seemed to pique his interest. It was clear to me that the Russians were surging ahead of America in space exploration. While we were content to keep orbiting around the Earth in our shuttle, the Russians were eyeing Mars and its moons.