Titan (17 page)

Fahy glared at him. “We’re talking about going to Saturn, for God’s sake. The greatest adventure in human history. A journey that will be talked about as long as mankind survives. An exploration that even eclipses Armstrong’s. Don’t you
care
about being a part of that?”

But Munn just stared back, his expression unreadable to Benacerraf.

I really don’t understand this new generation, she thought.

After a couple of days, Benacerraf had Fahy and her planners host a wider meeting at which the details of the mission were explored. Big, powerful suites of trajectory-mapping software—primed with precise predictions of the planets’ positions for decades to come—were deployed by the planners, running through option after option, with mission duration and initial mass in Earth orbit numbers scrolling over spread-out soft-screens.

The programs soon converged on an optimal trajectory. It was essentially similar to the complex path taken by
Cassini
to make the same trip, with the early part of the trajectory wrapped around the inner planets, slingshots off Earth and Venus, before unwinding towards the outer Solar System, and a final gravity assist from Jupiter. The meeting argued around the details and parameters, before settling on a recommendation:

To launch in January, 2008.

It would be, Benacerraf realized, one hell of a tight development schedule. Maybe even unachievable.

But it fit her internal timetable. It would be a whole year before Maclachlan was scheduled to take office and ground everything, and only a year for the bad guys in the USAF and beyond to find a way to close down NASA, and maybe not so far in the future that all of the current post-Chinese push back into space had worn off.

There really was no choice. The window of opportunity was closing quickly. If Americans were going to travel beyond the Moon, it would have to be in 2008. Or
never.

Benacerraf studied the smooth trajectory curves scrolling across the softscreens. “We understand this stuff so well,” she said to Fahy. “It’s astonishing how quickly we can produce material like this.”

“Oh, yes,” Barbara Fahy said sourly. “Our civilization has become expert at interplanetary navigation. It’s just that we’ve chosen to abandon the capability to
do
any of it.”

“Actually,” Gary Munn said brightly, “we can run the projections forward and back. Even as tar back as the 1960s there were proposals to slingshot off Venus and fly to Mars, and so forth, in the near future of the time; it’s interesting to move the planets back to their configurations, in 1982 or 1986, and see how accurately those old guys got their predictions.” He worked his keypad briskly, and Benacerraf watched trajectory curves wrap around the sun, depicting the paths of spacecraft that never were, traveling to Mars in 1982 and 1986 and 1992.

To Benacerraf, this precise, beautiful, useless rendering of all those lost missions was painful, almost physically.

Munn whistled as he worked the programs.

Benacerraf called in Mal Beardsley, her assistant program manager responsible for flight safety.

Mal was a bluff old-timer who had come in from solid-booster supplier Morton Thiokol after the
Challenger
accident, and he thought she was crazy. They spent a half-hour Benacerraf couldn’t really afford debating the pros and cons of the mission.

Beardsley left the room, grinning and tapping his graying temple. It was a reaction that Benacerraf figured she was going to have to get used to, and she forced a smile.

Still, Beardsley had a report in her softscreen within two days.

Beardsley had tried to devise abort options for the Titan mission.

A key objective in NASA mission planning had always been to provide abort options. And that philosophy had borne a lot of fruit. Even the use of the Lunar Module as a lifeboat, after the
Apollo 13
Service Module was crippled, had been practiced on an earlier flight. After
Challenger,
many more abort possibilities were built into the Shuttle mission profile, particularly the ascent phase. It all increased the survivability of the flights, on paper and in practice.

The flight to Earth orbit would be no real problem; standard Shuttle abort modes would be sufficient. And after the Titan ship left orbit, firing up its Shuttle main engines, abort options were still available: for instance, if the main engines malfunctioned, they could be shut down and the smaller OMS and RCS engines used to bring the craft around a huge U-turn and back to Earth. That would work up to a point, anyhow. Once the main engines had burned for long enough to apply more deltavee than the OMS and RCS could compensate for, the crew would be committed to an interplanetary flight of some kind. But even here, aborts were possible. The craft could modify its trajectory and slingshot around Venus, back to an early rendezvous with Earth. Even a slingshot back home around Jupiter would be possible.

Of course the problems of reentry from such an interplanetary jaunt would be formidable. Beardsley figured that the Apollo Command Modules, which had been built to withstand a direct entry into Earth’s atmosphere from the Moon, would be the most survivable possibility for the crew, and he recommended strongly against weakening the Apollos’ heatshields.

It would be one hell of an abort, however, Benacerraf reflected: the round trip to Venus or Jupiter would take months, even years, during which time the crew would presumably be struggling to survive in a crippled ship.

Past Jupiter, even Beardsley could find no meaningful aborts.

She started to make contacts with other senior NASA managers.

One of the first was with the JSC director, a tough, cost-conscious woman in her sixties called Millie Rimini. Benacerraf walked up two flights of stairs to Rimini’s office, and took in Barbara Fahy to give her pitch more technical plausibility.

Rimini’s job, as Benacerraf understood it, was—post-
Columbia
—to manage the rundown of JSC, to complete a part of Hadamard’s greater mission. So Benacerraf pitched the Titan mission as part makework, part cosmetic. Maybe the mission would actually save some jobs, at JSC. At worst, it would create a buzz of enthusiasm and raise morale; being able to work on a new program would sweeten the pill, for many, of the transfers and early retirements and layoffs that were to come. And so on. And the same applied to all the NASA centers.

Benacerraf had run big-budget engineering projects before; she knew how these things worked. People weren’t usually selfless; people sought to achieve their own personal goals, and treated projects as an arena in which to achieve those goals. In successful projects, the goals of the key players were in line with those of the project. Thus, managers like Rimini had to see benefits for themselves in the proposal, ways they could use it to achieve their own objectives, even as the Shuttles lifted off for Saturn. It was up to Benacerraf to figure out those benefits and present them.

It took a morning to convince Rimini that they should work seriously on this.

After that, Rimini encouraged Benacerraf to take the proposal to a wider group of NASA managers. Rimini set up a meeting at Marshall Spaceflight Center, in Alabama, of senior officials from Houston, the Cape, and Marshall, and from relevant NASA internal divisions. Rimini chaired the meeting.

Benacerraf was surprised to meet some opposition from the hard-line space buffs in some of the centers. The Cape managers, primed by a sweet-talk approach by Marcus White, could see no showstopper obstacles to refurbishing a Saturn launch complex, given the time and money. And the Shuttle-C flights would just be variants on STS launch procedures they’d already run a hundred and forty-three times—simplified variants, at that. But the old guys from Marshall, with their tough, conservative, confrontational approach to engineering that dated all the way back to Wernher von Braun, were more resistant. This stuff is only one chart deep, she was told. This is all way outside the experience base. Going to Saturn with chemical technology is a spectacularly dumb thing to do. What we have to do is revive the NERVA fission rocket program, and launch a set of nuclear stages into orbit in Shuttle orbiters, and, and…

It wasn’t hard to point out that nobody was going to endorse putting a nuclear rocket through the dangers of a Shuttle launch. Or, come to that, any near-future successor to the Shuttle. And besides, a program like NERVA, shut down in 1970, would cost billions to revive, if you were going to do it cleanly.

It was true. Going to Saturn with chemical was a dumb thing to do, dumb almost to the point of infeasibility. Like exploring Antarctica in a skiff. But it was the only boat leaving port, for the foreseeable future.

Slowly the Marshall people came round.

They all agreed to work on the proposal some more; it wasn’t yet time, they concurred, to take this to Jake Hadamard.

The work went on, sometimes around the clock. Benacerraf asked Millie Rimini to chair a critical review of the proposal, at JSC. It took two days of intensive briefings. Benacerraf had steeled herself to play devil’s advocate if she had to, to make sure all the tough questions were asked and answered. She found it wasn’t necessary; there was more than enough skepticism in the air, and the two days were long and hard.

Even so, the conclusion was that there was no technical obstacle to the Saturn flight.

Still Benacerraf wasn’t satisfied.

She had Beardsley run another safety review of the proposal, and she held a further briefing with senior Shuttle program executives and representatives of the principal contractors. Later, Rimini hosted a NASA management meeting at NASA Headquarters in Washington, to go over everything one more time. Then Benacerraf held a series of smaller, informal meetings with her key players, rehearsing and rehashing the arguments…

And on, and on.

Through all this, Benacerraf planned and replanned her campaign. It was going to take eighteen months, of figuring and investigating and re-evaluating. And all the time she was consciously building momentum, the Big Mo, behind her plan, working to persuade people that, yes, they could do this thing—that they
should
do this thing. If NASA could send
Apollo 8
around the Moon on the first manned Saturn V, then surely, after five decades of spaceflight, it could assemble the will for this one last effort…

On the whole, the response was good. But then, she hadn’t yet attempted to take the proposal outside NASA’s inner circles. And—aging and stale as they might be—most people who worked for NASA, even now, were pretty much space nuts.

NASA insiders were just the type to love crazy ideas like going to Titan. And NASA’s overenthusiasm had, she knew, caused a kind of collective lapse in good political judgment many times before. NASA insiders had a vision that the rest of the world, she told herself brutally, generally didn’t share.

And, she thought, nor did Jake Hadamard, which was why he had been appointed.

She knew that Hadamard would perceive grave risks, for the Agency and himself, in taking such an extravagant option. Giving the Shuttle orbiters to the Navy for gunnery practice was cheaper, and would cost no lives. And if failure were to come, she knew that the reaction would be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a hubristic mission.

It would be Hadamard who would have to answer such charges. Working out her approach to Hadamard was the key part of Benacerraf’s planning.

She moved a camp bed into her office at JSC. Sometimes, she didn’t go home to Clear Lake for days on end.

F
rom the air, Jiang Ling
thought the Houston area looked like the surface of another planet, occupied and systematically bombed, perhaps, by malevolent aliens. The coastline was riddled with bays, canals, lakes, bayous and lagoons, all filled with oily water. A perceptible smog hovered over the glittering refineries around Galveston Bay.

Her NASA host pointed out Galveston Island, where she could make out a long, clear yellow slice of coastline: evidently a fine sandy beach, with what looked like a bulky oil rig, out to sea. The NASA person told her that the rig was there to dredge up sea-bottom sand, and pump it to the shore. The beach used to be stony, and the sand was only about eleven years old! Jiang was startled by the note of pride in the woman’s voice at this comical monument.

The plane—an aging Cathay 747—began its descent.

She was bustled off the plane and processed briskly through customs. The terminal building felt cool—chill, in fact. Jiang wore only a light jacket and trousers; she wished briefly she had brought something heavier. But when she emerged from the terminal building into the full strength of the July noontime Houston sun, the heat and humidity hit her as it she’d walked into a wall. The air was tangibly moist, the light intense, great polarized sheets of it bouncing into her eyes from the soft-looking asphalt surface, and the glinting metal carapaces of the cars which clustered here.

Waiting for her was a limousine, jet black, with a big softscreen panel, bearing a message which scrolled across the doors and wing.
WELCOME JIANG LING, CHINA’S NUMBER ONE SPACEWOMAN
. The message was repeated in Spanish, Chinese, and English.