Voyage (63 page)
Authors: Stephen Baxter
Was there anything he should have done differently during the flight, anything he’d missed that might have saved Jones, Priest and Dana? And during the long development, how far was he responsible for the shoddiness, the carelessness which had finally destroyed the nuclear rocket?
He didn’t come up with any answers. He could, in retrospect, think of a thousand things he might have done differently. But he wasn’t wallowing; he knew that anything is possible with the benefit of hindsight. He’d done the best he could, at every stage of his career.
But it was no comfort.
It happened on my watch
.
In the hall of his rented apartment he had hung a small brass-framed photograph. It showed three spacesuited astronauts.
To Bert – In Your Hands
.
Seger didn’t go in or out of his apartment without looking at that photo and reading the inscription.
He found a run-down little Catholic church, tucked away just a few blocks from Headquarters, and took to spending time in there. He attended Mass three or four times a week. The ancient, gende ritual took him back to his childhood, and comforted him.
He was struck – shocked, even – by the poverty he saw around him in the neighborhood of the church, just blocks away from NASA Headquarters, here in the capital city of the richest nation on the planet.
He began to see that he’d been locked away inside NASA for too long, pursuing the organization’s single goal, the Mars landing, with blinkered obsessiveness. Perhaps they all had.
He remembered how shocked he’d been by the intrusion of those anti-nuke protesters at the Cape.
The world out here, beyond JSC, had continued to evolve, and Seger felt as if he was emerging into a new, harsh light, his NASA cocoon crumbling around him.
He went to the libraries and started going through back issues of newspapers – papers he’d barely scanned when they were printed, save for sports results and NASA coverage. Now, as he stared into grainy microfiche screens, he felt as if he was learning about some
phase of ancient history. But this was the world in which he had lived, the story of the country which supported him.
The United States was falling apart, it seemed to Seger.
The country was deep in recession. Under Reagan, there was a kind of cheerful, simplistic optimism around. But the divisions in society seemed to Seger to be growing wider than ever. Two Americas were emerging: there was a grotesque, materialistic money-chase among the already affluent, and among the poor – particularly the non-whites, in the inner cities – there was a tailspin of drugs, crime, decaying housing projects and a failing educational system.
And meanwhile, Seger learned, in the middle of the recession, Reagan was vastly increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Nuclear weapons were a key part of that build-up. Next year, cruise missiles would be deployed in Western Europe, in the face of much protest from those countries. There’d been more protest here, too, he read.
People were growing scared again. A DoD official had talked about how backyard shelters would save them all, when the bomb dropped.
If there are enough shovels going around, everybody’s going to make it
.
Seger read back as far as Three Mile Island. The similarities – administrative and technical – between that disaster and the Apollo-N incident chilled him.
The general press coverage of NASA, now he looked on it with his new perspective, startled him too. He saw skepticism, anger, contempt, resentment, on the part of the people outside looking in. He remembered how Eisenhower had cautioned against the growth of military and industrial power – against an expanded space program, in fact – because technocracy was foreign to the individualistic American spirit, and grafting it on to the nation was going to do a lot of harm. Well, Kennedy had accepted that risk. And it seemed to Seger now that the country was paying the price.
The space program, he saw now, was a prime symptom of all this. What
use
was any of it? The much-lauded spin-offs were minimal and probably would have come about anyhow, if the need was there. NASA had lobbied to go to Mars, he began to see, in order to justify itself, to keep its huge teams together, after the great lunar effort wound down.
Of course, freeing up NASA’s funds to other, Earth-bound projects would have been a token gesture. The money would have seeped away, Seger was sure, with no tangible benefit. But that wasn’t the point. The space program was like a huge, spindly,
etiolated plant, pushing all its energy obsessively into one sickly Mars-red bloom, while the society in which its roots were anchored was steadily disintegrating.
It just wasn’t appropriate. Any more than had been the over-ambitious civilian nuclear program, the weapons build-up …
The Mars mission came to seem almost blasphemous, to Seger.
A new clarity entered his thoughts, as he shaped these ideas. A new determination.
Of course he knew that he was still reacting to Apollo-N. His thoughts would be shaped by that defining incident for the rest of his life. Perhaps, in fact, he was still in some mild form of shock. It didn’t matter. Truth remained truth, no matter what the form of the revelation, and he felt he was on his own road to Damascus now, seeing the space program from the outside, in its true perspective, for the first time in his working life.
He found great comfort in his new perception.
The next time he attended Mass, he asked the priest if he could give a sermon.
| 313/11:33:22 CDR | … For my part, I want to use the opportunity of this telecast to register our awareness of the debt we owe to all those who came before us. This flight has come out of the efforts, first, of people from history, of scientists across the world, who have brought us to the point where we can meet the challenge even of a deep space trek like this across the Solar System. Next, the American people, who have expressed their will to see this great exploration adventure continue. Next, four Administrations and their congresses for having the courage to implement that will. After the Moon landings I think it’s true to say that America came close to turning its back on spaceflight, and it took political courage and vision to bring us to where we are, today. And then we come to the Agency and industry teams that built the spacecraft: the Saturn boosters, the Mission Module, the Apollo, and the MEM. This trip of ours to Mars may look to you simple or easy. I’d like to assure you that that has not been the case. The Saturn VB booster system which put us into orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked perfectly. This switch which I have in my hand now, if you can see that, has over three hundred counterparts in this control rack alone, and there are many more in the Command Module and the MEM. In addition to that, there are myriad circuit breakers, levers, rods and other associated controls. The MS-II, the big rocket stage on the back end of our Ares cluster, has performed flawlessly so far; and it must do so again, or we cannot return to the Earth … We have always had confidence that all this equipment will work and work properly, and we continue to have confidence that it will do so for the remainder of this flight. All this is possible only through the endeavors of a number of people. First, the American men and women who put these pieces of machinery together at the factory. Second, the test teams, with their painstaking work during the assembly and re-test after assembly. Third, the astronauts who flew before us to assemble the Ares components in Earth orbit. Finally, the people at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, in management, in mission planning and flight control, and in crew training. This operation is somewhat like a TV news show; all you see on screen is the three of us, but behind the scenery are thousands of others – hundreds of thousands. And every damn one of them did his or her job to the utmost. |
| 313/11:35:10 | [INAUDIBLE] |
| 313/11:35:12 CDR | And every one of them did his or her job to the utmost. To those people, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight. And finally we have to remember those crew, those astronauts, who have lost their lives in the course of our space program. Here I want to remember both Russians and Americans. I want to tell you that I begrudge every one of those lives lost, and no such price is worth paying. But by their sacrifice, those brave men and women have made this mission possible. God bless you. And now Ralph is going to show you something, the marker we’re intending to leave on the surface of Mars. Ralph? |
| 313/11:35:45 MMP | I have it. I’ll hold it up to the camera. I hope you can see that. Maybe if I turn it a little. For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll describe the marker. The marker is a disk of diamond, a little like a coin, about an inch across and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. It is a single-crystal diamond. An excimer laser was used to cut a message into the diamond, creating a layer of graphite in there, with a layer of diamond deposited on the top. The marker has been manufactured of diamond because that is the most durable material we know; the marker could survive for millions of years, long after our MEM and our other artifacts have been destroyed. As you know this is the only Mars flight planned for the foreseeable future. But the marker is like a time capsule, to people who may follow us to Mars; and it is, perhaps, a message to future life on Mars, to sentient beings who may emerge there some day. The marker is a little like a microfiche, with a lot of information stored on it, mostly too small for me to make out. But we have here greetings from all the nations of the Earth, and a map of the Solar System as it exists today, and information about the biological composition of human beings. And, embedded in the diamond, we have small samples of Earth rock, and of Moon rock, and human tissue. And, also on here, there is a list of all four hundred thousand Americans who have contributed to Project Ares. We think this is a fitting thing to leave there, on Mars, as a memorial of our mission. |
| 313/11:37:07 CDR | Okay. Natalie, I believe you’re going to tell the folks about our call signs for the rest of this mission. |
| 313/11:37:11 MSP | Thank you. I know that sometimes our space-age jargon confuses the hell out of people. |
| 313/11:37:15 CDR | Hot mike. |
| 313/11:37:17 MSP | Confuses people. And it sure confuses me. For instance, our space travelers’ ‘calendar.’ We count our days from the moment we left the ground, aboard our Saturn VB booster, from the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center. So, to us, today is MET 313 days – that’s three hundred and thirteen days of Mission Elapsed Time, more than three hundred days since we left Earth. While to you, it is a plain old Tuesday, January 28, 1986. And this business of the call signs is another problem. Why is it that spacecraft sometimes have call signs – individual names, like Apollo 11’s Eagle and Columbia – and at other times Houston will refer to us as just, say, ‘Ares’? The answer is that we need to use call signs when there is more than one separate spacecraft involved in a flight, and they need to be distinguished in our radio conversations. And that’s going to be true on this flight, when we get to Mars in a couple of months’ time, and we land on the surface in our MEM. Unlike the Apollo missions to the Moon, we decided not to choose the names for our separate craft until now, until after the launch, as we haven’t needed them. As a crew we thought we’d prefer to spend some of the long transfer time to Mars on thinking about that. |
| 313/11:38:18 MMP | Sure. That’s what we did. Rather than watch video tapes of the Superbowl. |
| 313/11:38:25 CDR | [INAUDIBLE] |
| 313/11:38:28 MSP | So today I’m going to tell you what names we’ve chosen. I know we have a lot of children listening today, at schools, and I hope this will bring alive some of the history lessons you have, and you’ll be able to see how what we’re doing today, in our exploration of Mars, is really an extension of the great journeys you can read about in your texts. Phil, if you … |
| 313/11:38:46 CDR | Sure. We’ve decided to name our spacecraft after famous exploration sailing ships of the past, uh, in line with what Natalie’s just said. And I’m particularly pleased with the name we’ve given to our Mission Module – that is, the place we’re living in during the voyage – because it was from the Mission Module that we conducted our study of Venus, as we flew past that planet. And we’ve decided to name it after the sailing ship which Captain James Cook commanded to Tahiti in 1769, to watch a transit of Venus across the sun: Endeavour . Ralph … |
| 313/11:39:17 MMP | Yeah. Then there’s our Apollo, which we’ll use to return to Earth. We’ve chosen the name Discovery . That’s actually for two ships: the one Henry Hudson captained in 1610, in his search for a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and another of the ships Cook captained, when he visited Hawaii, and Alaska, and western Canada. Back to Natalie. |
| 313/11:40:00 MSP | And now the MEM, the Excursion Module which will be the first ship to land humans on the surface of Mars. We’re going to call it after a famous US Navy ship, which made a prolonged and very successful exploration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the 1870s. |
| 313/11:40:19 CDR | Yes. |
| 313/11:40:21 MSP | We’re naming our MEM Challenger . |
Extracted from NASA, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, ‘Ares Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription,’ January 1986, pp. 1367ff. Ares Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC
The conference room was almost full, but a chair had been reserved for Udet in the front row. He took his seat, and crossed his legs with precise motions.
