Voyage (32 page)

Gershon stared at Dutch Kindelberger’s mural of the Mustang, and wondered what it had been like to fly.

As the meeting broke up, around nine p.m., the delegates began to make plans to rendezvous in various bars.

JK Lee approached Gershon. ‘You’re looking kind of strained.’

Gershon grinned at him. ‘I like the idea of a couple of pitchers of cold beer. But not in some shitty bar with these corporate suits, frankly.’

‘Yeah. Listen. You want to get out of here? It’s a clear night. We could take a drive, maybe up toward Edwards.’

Edwards Air Force Base. Up on the high desert. ‘Let’s go.’

They got out of the Brickyard. Lee pulled his little black T-bird out of the parking lot, and they stopped to pick up a couple of six-packs, and then Lee headed north, out of the city.

The night was crisp and cool and cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the conurbation’s sulphur-orange glow. Gershon had to tilt his head back and stare straight up to see any stars, in a little clear circle of sky directly above him. He thought he recognized the big square of Pegasus up there, the winged horse.

He had a sense of confinement, as if the city and all its smog was a great big box he was stuck inside.

Lee drove one-handed, hanging onto the T-bird’s wheel with one finger. ‘I remember coming up here. I mean, 1955 or earlier. The days of the B-70. The road out of the city was just a two-lane blacktop, winding up out of the Newhall Pass and through Mint Canyon, until it gave onto the high desert And Palmdale was just a gas station, with a whole bunch of Joshua trees … All changed now, huh.’

‘I guess.’

‘So. You had a good day?’

Gershon grunted. ‘Not one of my best.’

‘You’re not a lover of engineering debate.’

‘That wasn’t a debate about engineering. And most of those guys sure weren’t engineers.’

Lee hooted. ‘You’re right there. But you got to understand the politics, my friend. Look at it this way. When Nixon canned the Space Shuttle, back in 1972 – well, that wasn’t the most popular decision with the big aerospace boys. They would have loved the Shuttle because the whole damn thing would have been
new
. They would have been able to throw away all their old Saturn tooling facilities and start afresh, at great public expense. But with the
incremental program we’ve got now, everything is a derivative of something else. And it’s all pretty much owned by the companies who designed those pieces.

‘So you got Boeing working on the new MS-IC, for example, the enhanced Saturn first stage, which was what they’d originally built. And McDonnell Douglas, over at Huntingdon Beach, have built the Skylabs and Moonlabs – space stations lashed up from disused Saturn third stages – which McDonnell built in the first place. And so on.

‘But the plum contract – the most advanced technology, the real glamor work for the next decade – is going to be the MEM. A whole new spacecraft, to take a few guys to the surface of Mars. Making a lot of other guys very rich in the process …’

‘But NASA hasn’t even issued a Request For Proposals yet.’

‘Of course not. What do you expect? NASA’s taking too much heat from its contractors. And then on top of that you got all the usual bullshit infighting between the NASA centers.’

‘Maybe so,’ Gershon said gloomily. ‘But we’ve already pissed away six years, since ’72.’

‘You want to fly something before you retire.’

‘You got it.’

‘Hell, I understand that. Listen, you want to break open that six-pack?’

‘You want one?’

‘Sure.’

Gershon’s can was still dewed from the store’s refrigerator. The beer was crisp in his mouth; he felt some of the tension of the day unwind.

The San Gabriel Mountains were behind them now, and Lee pushed the T-bird hard through the blackness. The road was vacant, laser-straight, fore and back, in the lights of the T-bird.

Now, there were stars all the way down to the horizon. JK Lee propped the wheel between his bony knees, and, holding his beer in one hand, extracted a cigarette and lit it up with the other. The light of the tip combined with the dashboard’s glow to cast soft, diffuse light over his face.

Gershon asked, ‘So what would you do?’

‘Huh?’

‘If you were going to build a MEM.’

‘Me? Oh, we aren’t going to bid. We’d ruffle too many feathers. And the big boys would crowd us out anyhow. Rockwell is going to get the contract. Everybody knows that. They’ll pull strings, just
like they did to get Apollo. I understand the MEM was part of the deal, kind of, when Nixon canceled the Shuttle. That and their Saturn second stage injection-booster project. You got to balance your constituencies.’ His Bronx accent came out comically on that last word.

Gershon grunted and pulled at his beer. ‘But if you were bidding,’ he pressed.

‘If we were?’ Lee thought for a moment, balancing his beer on his lap. ‘Well, you got to adjust your philosophy to accommodate the situation. You might get just one shot at this, a trip to Mars. So you want something that you know you can build quickly, and cheaply, that’s gonna work first time. And we don’t know if lifting bodies and biconics are going to work, and we could spend a lot of time and money finding out they don’t.’

‘So what?’

‘So you use what’s worked before. Start with a low L-over-D shape, say of zero point five.’

L-over-D: lift over drag, the key aerodynamic measure of shape. ‘Point five. That’s an Apollo Command Module shape.’

‘Exactly. Build a big, fat Command Module. All you’d need to figure is how to build a wider heatshield. We know it’s a design that works. Apollos flew eight manned Moon program flights, and since then three missions a year to Skylab, and one a year to the Moonlab since ’75 … what’s that, twenty-five flights? And the Apollo 13 CM even survived its Service Module exploding under it.’

‘You’d have no maneuverability in the Martian atmosphere.’

‘Not as much as a biconic, but you’d have some. Just like with Apollo. If you offset the center of gravity you get a certain amount of control, with lift coming from the shape. And here’s the thing. The aerodynamics would be simple enough for you to fly the fucking thing down by hand if you had to, even if the electronics failed. You couldn’t do that with a biconic.’

‘What about after the atmosphere entry? Parachutes?’

Lee thought about it. ‘Nope. Air’s too thin. You’d have to have some system of busting out of the heatshield and landing on a descent engine, like the Lunar Module. Like the Grumman bid, I guess. And then you’d have an ascent stage, the top half of the cone, to get you back to orbit. You’d leave behind the heavy heatshield, and all the surface gear.’

It all made sense to Gershon. It would be low cost, low development risk, low operational risk.
It’s all I need, to land on Mars. And you could have the thing flying in a few years
.

‘JK, you ought to put in a bid. I’m serious.’

Lee just laughed.

He waved ahead, gesturing with his can. ‘Look out there.’

Gershon saw that the desert here was a flat, pale white crust in the starlight. Salt flats. And, on the horizon, a row of lights appeared out of nowhere, like a city in the desert.

‘Edwards,’ Lee said. ‘Where I came with Stormy Storms to watch the X-15 fly. Christ, they were the good days.’ He took another pull of his beer, then threw the can out of the car.

Gershon handed him another can, and the T-bird sped on, as the giant hangars of the Air Force Base loomed out of the darkness around them.

She was held up for an hour at Building 110, the security office of the JSC campus.

How are you supposed to present yourself, if you’re a rookie astronaut reporting for your first morning’s work? You have no identification badge on your shirt pocket, because on that first day, you have to enter the Space Center grounds to have the badge issued …

Strictly speaking, of course, York thought, it was an infinite regress, a paradox. It was logically impossible ever to enter JSC. She tried to explain this to the receptionist.

The receptionist, her broad, fleshy face a puddle of sweat, just looked at her, and turned to deal with the press people queuing behind her. After a while York shut up and sat in the poky little building, trying to stop her hands folding over themselves.

Finally a secretary, tottering on heels, came out to collect her.

The secretary led her across the spiky grass of the campus. The woman was around thirty. She trailed a cloud of cosmetic fumes – perfumes and face powder and hairspray – that made York’s eyes sting. She looked oddly at York, and York could see the woman considering giving her girl-to-girl tips about where to get
something
done about that hair.

York clutched her empty briefcase and wondered what the hell she was doing here.

The secretary took her to Building 4, and told her she was expected to attend the regular pilots’ meeting straight away. Every second Monday morning, at eight: she was already late.

She slipped into the meeting room, at the back.

There were maybe fifty people sitting around in the room: all men, clean-cut, close-shaven, crew-cut, wearing sports shirts and slacks. There was a lot of wisecracking, and deep, throaty laughter that rumbled around the room.

Chuck Jones, chief astronaut, stood at the front of the room, hands on hips. Jones was talking about some technical detail of the T-38 training aircraft.

York spotted an empty seat, not far from the door, and with muttered apologies she squeezed past a few sets of knees toward it. The astronauts made way for her politely enough, but she was aware of their gaze on her, curious, speculative, checking out her figure, studying her un-made-up face.
What the hell’s this? Is it female? Are you here to take notes, baby? Make mine decaffeinated …

She spotted Ben Priest, sitting up front with his arms folded, looking the part.

‘Now,’ Jones said from the front of the room, ‘I’ve had reports from Ellington that some of you guys aren’t checking out your equipment before flying the T-38.’

There were groans. ‘Christ, Chuck, do we have to go through all this again?’

‘We want to keep the privilege of flying the T-38s. But it’s a privilege that can be rescinded any time. You may be astronauts, but you aren’t free from the routine responsibilities of checking out what you fly. All I’m asking for is a little more effort, to keep those guys at Ellington sweet …’

Jones started going through assignments for the next two weeks. ‘Okay, we have Bleeker, Dana and Stone to the Cape Tuesday to Friday. Gershon to Downey, all week. Curval and Priest to Los Angeles.’

Someone spoke up from the floor. ‘Hey, Chuck. I thought you were coming with us to LA.’

‘No, I changed my mind. I’m going to the Cape. I want to go through the new CM sim they’re building out there.’

‘Don’t you like us any more, Chuck?’

‘You guys go west and I’ll go east any time …’

This kind of bullshit went on for half an hour. By the end of it, York was feeling restless, baffled by the barrage of jargon, bemused
by the slowness and apparent waste of time. It was like, she imagined, being inside an unusually clean men’s locker room.

She felt intimidated and out of place.
How can I make a mark in an environment like this?

She met the rest of the cadre she’d been recruited into: eight others, all men, mostly with flying experience. They looked bright, eager, young, alert. Christ, three of them were already wearing astronaut-issue sports shirts! How had they
known?

Chuck Jones took the new rookies on a tour of the Center.

York peered through doorways into the empty offices of senior astronauts. All the rooms looked the same, neat and spruce and barely lived-in, with pictures of spacecraft and airplanes on the walls. On the desks were boys’ toys: aircraft and lunar modules, and models of the new Saturn VB, with solid rocket boosters you could snap on and off.

She half-expected to see spare sports shirts hanging behind the veneered doors.

Everywhere they walked, people deferred to Jones, as if he was some kind of king. He didn’t seem to notice.
My God,
York thought.
There are going to be some monumental egos, around here
.

Jones led the nine of them into his big office in Building 30, and gave them coffee. He walked them through their induction program. For her first year York would be an ‘ascan’ – an astronaut candidate. She’d go through six months of classroom lectures on astronomy, aerodynamics, physiology, spacecraft systems, interplanetary navigation, upper atmosphere physics … Back to school. There would be visits to Kennedy, Marshall, Langley and other NASA centers.

They’d be ‘smoothed,’ as Jones put it; the instructors would try to ensure that they all emerged with a certain base level of skills in every discipline, regardless of their background. That was partly for PR purposes, York gathered, so they could talk intelligently on every aspect of their future missions.

There would be some physical training, in simulators and centrifuges and the like. There would be some compulsory flight experience, in the back of a T-38, but, unlike previous cadres of scientist-astronauts, this group would not have to attend flight school.

It was a break from tradition.
They’re letting in astronauts who aren’t pilots!
Chuck Jones looked as if he was chewing nails as he forced this news out, and some of the more bushy-tailed guys looked disappointed; one even asked if he could
volunteer
for flight school.

After their ascan year, the candidates would be put on the active roster, and would be considered for assignment to flights. Then, maybe two years before a flight, mission-specific training would begin …

‘In theory,’ Jones said.

Someone spoke up.
‘In theory,
sir?’

Jones said bluntly, ‘I might as well just tell you guys straight out. You’re not going to be seeing any action for a while. None of you is dumb, so you know what the funding situation is like up on the Hill.