Titan

Angel and White exchanged glances.

White said, ‘A Shuttle orbiter to Saturn? Well, why the hell not? It’s the nearest thing to a spaceship we got.’ He turned to Rosenberg, grinning. ‘You know, I love the way you think.’

Angel said, ‘How are you going to get a Space Station hab module down to the surface of Titan?’

‘Easy,’ Rosenberg said, chewing. ‘Titan has a thick atmosphere, and a low gravity. You’d glide the hab module down, inside your Shuttle orbiter. Which is why you’d take the orbiter. The aerosurfaces would need some modification, but –’

‘Holy shit,’ Libet said. ‘You’ve worked this out. You’re serious, aren’t you, kid?’

Angel said, ‘Okay, so this is just a mind game, right? A bull session. Maybe you’re right, Rosenberg. Maybe you could do that quickly and cheaply. But not if you wanted a man-rated system.’

Siobhan Libet said, ‘But we aren’t talking about the kind of assured safety we have in the current program, Bill. We know this whole thing would be risky as hell.’

Bill Angel said curtly, ‘I’m talking about some kind of entry profile that would actually be survivable.’

‘It wouldn’t have to be,’ Rosenberg said.

Marcus White groaned and helped himself to some more wine. ‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘He has another idea.’

‘Send the orbiter down to Titan unmanned,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Then it can land as hard as you like.’

‘And what about the crew?’ Angel said.

‘All you need is a couple of simple man-rated entry capsules,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Remember, we aren’t talking about any kind of ascent-to-orbit capability; it’s a one-way trip.’ He grinned. ‘You still aren’t thinking big enough, Bill.’

‘And you,’ Angel snapped back, ‘are talking out of your ass. An entry capsule like that is still a billion-dollar development. We just don’t have that kind of resource.’

Rosenberg looked flustered, and Benacerraf realized that for the first time he didn’t have an answer.

She felt an immense sadness descend on her. Is it possible that this is the hole that destroys the proposal? That, after all, it ends here?

How sad. It was a beautiful dream, while it lasted.

They argued for a while, about requirements and likely costs. It started to get heated, with gestures illustrated by pointed chopsticks. Barbara Fahy held her hands up, palms outward. ‘Hold it,’ she said. ‘I hate to say it, but I think I have a solution.’

Benacerraf frowned. ‘Tell me.’

Fahy looked around the table. ‘We use the most advanced entry capsules we ever built. Apollo Command Modules.’

Marcus White was laughing. ‘Oh, man. That is outrageous. Just fucking outrageous. It’s beautiful. Man, I love it.’

Fahy said, ‘All you’d have to do is refurbish the interior, maybe fix up the heatshield, reconfigure for a Titan entry profile.’

Benacerraf said, ‘Marcus, where’s the old Apollo hardware now?’

White was trying to be serious, but grins kept busting out over his face. ‘There were three series of Command Modules: boiler-plates, Block Is and Block IIs. The Block IIs flew all the manned missions; they contained most of the post-fire modifications. The Block IIs is what you’d want to use.’ He closed his eyes. ‘As I recall, Rockwell built twenty-five Block II CMs in all. Okay. Of those twenty-five ships, eleven flew on the Apollo Moon program. Three more flew manned Skylab missions, and one flew on ASTP. Fifteen, right?’

‘Where are they?’ Benacerraf asked. ‘Museums? Could we refurbish an Apollo that’s already been flown?’

Angel frowned. ‘I don’t see how. Those things were pretty much beat up by the time they were recovered. You got the ablation of the heatshield, thermal stresses throughout the structure, salt-water damage from the ocean recovery. The heatshield alone would be a hell of a reconstruction job.’

Benacerraf said, ‘Marcus, what happened to the ten spares? Do you remember?’

‘I sure do,’ he said ruefully. ‘Since they symbolized my career, as it went down the toilet, I followed the fate of those Moon ships with close interest.’ He closed his eyes. ‘They used four for various tests: thermal vacuum and pogo, acoustic, pad checkout. And another three for Skylab tests. They pretty much took those babies apart, for the purposes of the tests.’

‘That leaves three,’ Angel said evenly.

‘Yeah. First you got a Skylab backup. It sat on the pad on top of a Saturn IB as a rescue capability, through the whole Skylab program. And then there were two Moon-trip Apollos, never flown. “Requirement deleted”. Three man-rated spacecraft, never flown, just mothballed.’

Benacerraf felt herself smile. ‘Maybe we’re about to undelete those requirements.’

There was another moment of silence.

Then they started to talk at once. ‘Where are those CMs?’ ‘All in storage at JSC, or Downey.’ ‘Three CMs. Two flight birds and one test vehicle, for verifying the redesign and refurbishment.’ ‘The electronics should be easy. Those old clunky guidance computers they had took up so much damned room. All that core rope and shit …’

Benacerraf let it run on.

It’s coming together, she thought. She felt a core of excitement gather in her gut.

Angel, still drinking hard, was doodling spacecraft configurations and shapes on a smoothed-out paper napkin. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to do this one-way shot, we ought to get away with a fuel load, in Earth orbit, of one and a half million pounds. And of that, around two hundred thousand pounds would be hauled out to Saturn for braking there.’

‘That,’ said Benacerraf, ‘is less than a single Shuttle External Tank.’

‘Yeah,’ White growled. ‘But you’re still looking at a couple of dozen Shuttle flights to put it up there.’

Siobhan Libet said, ‘But you wouldn’t need to use the full Shuttle system. You’re not carrying crew, except on one final flight to orbit.’

Benacerraf prompted, ‘So what do we do instead?’

‘Shuttle-C,’ said Libet promptly. ‘A stripped-down cargo-carrying variant of the Shuttle system. The payload capacity would be raised to a hundred and seventy thousand pounds.’

Mott nodded. ‘But the Shuttle-C is an expendable variant. Essentially you’d be using up the orbiter fleet.’

‘But that doesn’t matter,’ Libet said.

‘She’s right,’ White said. ‘Nicola, we’re working to different rules now. The damn things wouldn’t fly again anyhow. It’s a choice of putting them to work one last time, or stick ’em out in the rain as monuments.’

‘Okay. But even so this is only a partial solution,’ Angel said. ‘We have three orbiters left: Endeavour, Atlantis, Discovery. You’d want to retain one for the final crew launch, so you’re left with two Shuttle-C launches. That would only account for a quarter, maybe, of the total mass in LEO for Titan.’

Libet said, ‘There were two more pre-flight orbiters.’

‘Yes,’ said Benacerraf. ‘Enterprise and Pathfinder. Now, what the hell happened to them?’ She went to a bookcase, and searched through her yellowing Shuttle training materials. ‘Here we go. “Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise: Orbiter Vehicle-101. Enterprise, the first Space Shuttle orbiter, was originally to be named Constitution, for the Bicentennial. However, Star Trek viewers started a write-in campaign urging the White House to rename the vehicle to Enterprise… blah blah … OV – 101 was rolled out of Rockwell’s Air Force Plant 42, Site I –”’

White shrugged. ‘They used Enterprise for the approach and landing tests. Then they decided it would cost too much to upgrade Enterprise for spaceflight. Tough on all those propeller-head Star Trek fans. So they stripped her. She’s a museum piece now.’

Libet asked, ‘What about Pathfinder?’

Benacerraf dug through her documents. “‘The Pathfinder Shuttle Test Article … Pathfinder is a seventy-five ton orbiter simulator that was created to work out the procedures for moving and handling the Shuttle. It was a steel structure roughly the size, weight and shape of an orbiter … Pathfinder was returned to Marshall and now is on permanent display at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville –”’

Libet said, ‘I imagine Pathfinder would be a lot more problematic to adapt for Shuttle-C than Enterprise, or the flight orbiters. But if we can do it –’

‘Then,’ Barbara Fahy said, ‘you’d have four Shuttle-Cs. But they still aren’t enough.’

‘No.’ Angel scratched numbers quickly on his napkin. ‘We still need twice the carrying capacity. What else?’

‘The Energiya,’ Rosenberg said. ‘The old Soviet heavy-lift booster. How about that? What was its lifting capacity?’

‘Three hundred thousand pounds to LEO,’ Angel said.

‘So,’ Rosenberg said, ‘two or three Energiya launches –’

‘I don’t think it would work,’ Siobhan Libet said. ‘I’m sorry.’ Benacerraf could see she was genuinely regretful. ‘I was shown around the Energiya facilities at Tyuratam when I was training for Soyuz Station return. Actually the Energiya facility was built on the site of their old N – 1 launch facility, the Soviets’ attempt at a lunar-mission heavy-lift booster. The Russians have killed it. The integration hall is – spectral. Full of mothballed strap-on boosters, tanks, engines, other Energiya components, pretty much deteriorated; I don’t think it could be refurbished.’

‘Damn waste of time and money,’ White said. ‘I once saw one of their Shuttle flight models. They’ve set it up in Gorky Park, for kids to play at being astronauts.’

Angel blew out his cheeks. ‘So we’re stuck again. What else?’

‘We could go to the Air Force,’ Siobhan Libet said. ‘Use their heavy-lift boosters, the new Delta IVs.’

Benacerraf shook her head. ‘We could try an approach, but they wouldn’t buy it. Believe me, I’ve seen enough politics since Columbia. The USAF will hinder us, not cooperate. Anyhow, Delta can’t lift more than forty thousand pounds to LEO. The number of launches required would be prohibitive.’

‘Then we’re screwed,’ Angel said. He threw his pen down on the table, and crumpled up his napkin.

But Marcus White was grinning. He scratched his cheek; the stubble made a rasping noise against his fingernails. ‘Lawn ornaments,’ he said.

Angel, his arms folded, looked at him. ‘What?’

‘You know, there are NASA centers with Moon rockets lying around on their driveways, for dumb fucking kids to gawp at. JSC, Kennedy, Michoud, Marshall. Now, what if –’

‘You’re kidding,’ Angel said.

‘I’m only talking about refurbishing the existing flight hardware, and a few test engines, not reviving the whole damn production line. All you’d have to do is bring the things in from the rain, scrape off the moss, give them a fresh lick of paint … I know they have some engines in bonded storage, down at Michoud. And I’ll bet there are still a few of those old bastards around who worked on the original development in the 1960s.’

Barbara Fahy frowned. ‘I guess it could be done. The old launch complexes at the Cape, 39-A and 39-B, are still operational. They were adapted for Shuttle.’

‘Then they can be unadapted,’ White snapped back.

Angel was figuring. ‘So to complement our four Shuttle-C launches, and allowing a margin for boiloff, assembly equipment – we’d need four launches.’

‘And four birds,’ White said, ‘is what we got, lying around.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘There are two operational articles – AS – 514 and – 515, from the deleted Moon flights – at JSC and Michoud. Then you have two test articles, AS – 500D and – 500T, at Marshall and Kennedy. I guess bringing them up to specification would be more of a challenge, but I bet it could be done.’ White looked triumphant, somehow vindicated, Benacerraf thought. ‘I’d love to see those birds fired off at last, after all these years. The idea of those spaceships just lying around in the rain has always bugged me …’

‘And if we can do that,’ Angel said, ‘then it’s feasible. We have enough heavy-lift capability.’ He looked at Rosenberg and laughed. ‘Good grief, Rosenberg. I think we’ve done it; we’ve found a way to close the design.’

Libet looked confused, as this talk swirled around her. ‘What are you talking about?’

Mott took her hand and squeezed it gently. ‘Saturn Vs,’ she said. ‘They’re talking about flying Saturn Vs again …’

‘Oh,’ said Libet. ‘Oh, my God.’

They talked on, debating details and approaches, as the candles burned steadily down.

The one topic they never approached – as if skirting around it – was the risk.

If the risk of not returning from an Apollo flight had been something like one in ten – and most engineers agreed the risk on Shuttle was around one in a hundred – and given the distances and the extent of this venture outside of the experience base and the difficulty of maintaining political will behind a project spanning so many years – what was the risk of not returning from Titan?

A lot worse than fifty-fifty, Benacerraf thought. Each of them, here, was signing up for Russian roulette, with the barrels loaded against them. And each of them had to know that.

But they were prepared to go anyhow. They all had to be crazy, by any conventional definition.

They were a motley crew, Benacerraf thought: Rosenberg the dreamer, Fahy the tough, wounded engineer, Angel the burned-up, goal-oriented drinker, White the stranded Moonwalker, Libet and Mott younger, enigmatic, but still, she sensed, touched with the wanderlust. And herself: determined to do something with the rest of her life other than just survive Columbia.

Flawed people, all of them. And not one of them had anything to live for that was more meaningful than dreams of a jaunt to Titan.

Maybe that was necessary; maybe it had always been true. Who else would go on such a mission? Nobody happy with her life, that was for sure.

And who would come up with such a vision, she thought, but a misfit like Rosenberg? Rosenberg, with his sense of his place in the cosmos – a sense of depth, change, flux – that sense that he doesn’t belong here, that he’s a mere conduit of celestial matters and forces …

Yeah. A better sense of the Universe than of what’s going on in the heads of his fellow human beings.

Maybe NASA had been wise, all these years, to neglect the psychology of its space travellers. Maybe that was the only possible approach. In this room alone there was probably enough material for a three-day shrinks’ conference.

But what the hell. All that mattered was that she had her team.

And it was some dream. With a colony on Titan – even one scraping a precarious living from the slush – it just wouldn’t be possible for the folks here at home to slump back into some kind of flat-Earth mentality. The Universe would always be alive, with humans living on an island up in the sky.

Maybe, she thought, Rosenberg is single-handedly saving the future.

Now, she thought wryly, all they had to do was convince NASA, the Government, and the rest of the goddamn human race to let them do this. The real work started here.

Kevin, the housekeeper, came in to clear up the dishes and deliver coffee and more drinks. Benacerraf watched him as he worked, the heady talk of Titan and Shuttle-Cs and Apollos flowing around him. Kevin’s smooth, moonlike face was blank, incurious; Benacerraf doubted he heard a word that was said.

He had a new image-tattoo on his forehead, Benacerraf saw. The lozenge-shaped patch of glowing photochemicals cycled through images of smoky star-clusters, evidently downloaded from one of the Hubble picture libraries.

She found she’d made her decision.

Here, in this room, she thought, it starts. And it won’t end until we land on Titan.

As he left, Marcus White winked at Benacerraf. ‘Everest, El Dorado, Mayflower. I don’t know whether we’re going to Titan or not, or why the hell. But you sure do throw one great party, kid.’

The first task was to flesh out the mission profile.

Benacerraf set Barbara Fahy working on the feasibility of adapting mission control software and techniques to handle the Saturn and Shuttle-C launches, and the extended mission profile after that.

She quickly came back to Benacerraf with a schedule and costing. Fahy had shown how STS mission control techniques could be adapted with a little effort to run Shuttle-C and revived Saturn programs. Then, looking ahead for a feasible way to run a manned mission to Saturn, Fahy argued that you didn’t want to have a full team of controllers employed for all six or eight or ten years. Fahy’s projection showed how a scaled-down Mission Control operation would suffice to run the flight itself after the initial interplanetary injection sequence; hands-off techniques developed to run extended Earth-orbit operations aboard Station could be adapted. It would be necessary to rehire staff or attach contract workers during the later crucial mission phases, like a Jupiter encounter. But it could all be done for a containable cost.

Benacerraf was working to a timetable she hadn’t yet shared with many people. And to her, the setup schedule even for this ground-based aspect of the mission looked tight. But then, everything would be tight, pushing against the clock, until the last Shuttle lifted off the pad …

Benacerraf worked through Fahy’s case carefully.

Barbara Fahy was almost pathetically eager to work on this proposal, to find some way of redeeming her self-respect after being lead Flight on Columbia. It seemed to do no good to point out that Fahy was not responsible for the hardware and testing flaws that had led to the orbiter’s destruction, that no blame had been attached to her – that, in fact, her career had been done no perceptible damage at all.

As far as Fahy was concerned, it had been her mission. And she’d lost it.

Still, her judgement was unimpaired; her work on this issue looked good.

Benacerraf accepted the recommendation, but a seed of doubt lodged in her mind. A scaled down Mission Control would be fine, but if some kind of Apollo 13 situation blew up, halfway to Jupiter, the crew would need fast backup by experts on the ground: revised procedures, survival techniques, simulator proving … there mightn’t be time to hire up and train the people needed.

Anyhow, with that basic framework in hand, Barbara Fahy called in the senior members of her control team, and, with Benacerraf, talked them through the proposed flight.

They listened in silence – stunned, frightened silence, Benacerraf thought.

If NASA sent a spacecraft to Saturn, it would be these young, smart people – or their peers – who would have the responsibility for seeing that all the burns happened at the right times, for the right durations, with the spacecraft in the right attitudes; they would have to oversee navigation all the way to Titan, and prepare abort contingency plans.

There was a lot of scepticism. Even hostility. ‘How do you think we’re gonna do this?’ ‘We can’t possibly. All our systems are designed for low Earth orbit missions.’ ‘How can you think –’

Fahy knew her people, however, and she let them run down. ‘Just chew it over for a few days,’ she told them. ‘You don’t have to come up with all the answers at once. And talk to people. Talk to the Apollo old-timers, about the problems of deep space manned missions. Talk to the guys at JPL, about interplanetary navigation techniques. I know it’s one hell of a challenge, guys, the biggest since Apollo –’

‘But,’ said one languid young man – introduced by Fahy as Gary Munn – ‘those 1960s guys could look forward to some kind of career within NASA. More than one mission, a future. Not just a one-off stunt like this.’

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 softscreens.

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 far 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, travelling 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 greying 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 practised 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 delta-vee 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.