Titan

‘Now, facing lobbies like that, with institutional rivalries going back a half century, I sure as hell am not prepared to go into bat for any kind of shit-headed NASA insider stuff about how everything is fine and dandy, just another technical glitch we can get over with a little work. Did you know that the NASA management recommended just continuing with the Shuttle launch schedule in the immediate wake of Challenger? They had to be forced to take a hiatus while they figured out and fixed the problems. You will not find this Administrator making the same mistake.’

‘I’ll tell you how we can minimize risk,’ Benacerraf said hotly. ‘We just won’t fly. Jake, we’re flying experimental aircraft, here. You just can’t expect the public to see it this way. We’re the professionals. We understand the risks, and we accept them. That’s why there are no Challenger tombstones and memorials and plaques all over JSC. Jake, you have to have a little taste. You can’t keep looking back at some disaster, all the time. We have to move on. We’re looking at the future of humanity here, the expansion of the human race into –’

Hadamard waved her silent. ‘Let’s save the speeches, Paula. Besides, I think you are too smart to believe it. The truth is we are never going to move out into deep space. There’s nowhere to go. The Moon’s dead, Venus is an inferno, Mars is almost as dead as the Moon. And even if there was a worthwhile destination the journey would kill us. We’re not going anywhere, not in our lifetimes, probably not ever. It was always just a dream. People understand that, instinctively, in a way they never did in the 1960s, during Apollo. That’s why, I fear, they’re sick of spaceflight – Shuttle, the Station – and sick of the people who promote it.’

His words, though mildly expressed, seemed brutally hard. Benacerraf shivered, suddenly, despite the continuing warmth of the day. My God, she thought. He’s going to let it go. Is that what he’s brought me here to tell me?

Here in this nondescript wood, beside this slightly tacky memorial, she could be witnessing the death of the US manned space program.

They turned and began to walk out of the wood, back towards the car.

‘Why did you ask to see me, today? What do you want of me?’

‘We’re going to be hit hard by Congress and the White House and the DoD over Columbia, Paula. Whatever I decide, I might not survive myself. And even if I do I’m going to have to shake up many levels of the management hierarchy, in all the centers. I’m trying to think ahead.

‘I know I’m going to need someone to take over the Shuttle program. A fresh face. A management outsider, Paula, someone who’s untainted by all the NASA crap.’

She frowned. ‘You mean me?’

‘You’ve the right qualifications, the right experience. I’ve watched how you’ve handled yourself in the fall-out from Columbia, and I’ve been impressed. And you have the right air of distance from the real insiders.’

She said, ‘My God. You’re asking me to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle program.’

‘Mothballing, Paula. That’s the language we’ll use. Look, it’s an important job.’

‘To you?’

He grinned. ‘Hell, yes, to me. What did you think I meant?’

‘But what about all the other programs? The stuff you started after Chinese-Sputnik panic, the RLV initiatives …’

‘Frankly,’ Hadamard said, ‘I don’t much care. If some damn Shuttle II ever flies, it will be long after I’m out of the hot seat. And if it ever does fly you know Maclachlan will just shut it down, when he takes the White House. All that matters to me is how to use up the Shuttle technology. That project, unlike RLV, will come to fruition during my term.’

Benacerraf got it. It could be that a judicious, sensitively handled wind-down of Shuttle would be the criterion on which Hadamard would be judged: on which the rest of his career might depend.

‘Sure. So what about the components? What do we do with the three remaining orbiters?’

‘You’ve heard some of the suggestions. You’ll hear more. The dreamers at Marshall want to respond to the Chinese, to go to the Moon. As ever. The USAF want nuclear space battle stations, or to practise sub-orbital bomb runs over Moscow. The Navy want to use the birds as target practice. And so on.’

‘Do you have a preference?’

‘Only that whatever you come up with fits the mood.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Anyhow, JSC could use a new lawn ornament. The one we have now is getting a little rusty.’

‘I understand,’ she said sourly.

Lawn ornaments. Jesus.

She did understand. Hadamard wanted her to guide what was left of the Shuttle program through the current panic about the Chinese, all the way to the usual run-down and cancellations that would follow.

But, she thought, maybe it didn’t have to be like that.

If she took this job, she would move into a position where she could make things happen.

And there are, she thought, other possibilities than turning spaceships into lawn ornaments. Even if doing anything constructive would mean battling past the opposition of a lot of interests, not least the USAF. And even if it would all, it seemed, have to be a race against time, ensuring that whatever was set up was in place before Congressman Xavier Maclachlan became President and had a chance to shoot it in the head …

It was a hell of a challenge. But suddenly dreams like Rosenberg’s didn’t seem so remote. Suddenly she was in a position to move proposals like that out of the realms of thought experiments, even make them happen.

They emerged into the bright sunlight of the field beyond the wood. In the distance, the children continued to play, their calls rising to the sky.

For the first time since hitting the dirt at Edwards, she felt her pulse pick up a beat of excitement.

She said to Hadamard, ‘I’ll do the job.’ But, she thought, maybe not the way you expect me to.

On Monday morning she moved into her new office at JSC. She called in her secretary and asked him to set up a series of meetings. George, a sombre but competent young man with his hair woven into tight plaits, took notes and began his work.

She needed a team. So she made a list for George: Marcus White, the stranded Moonwalker; Barbara Fahy, the woman who had tried to bring Columbia home; the young Station astronauts Mott and Libet; Bill Angel, the nearest thing to a competent pilot she knew. And Isaac Rosenberg, the dreamer, the crazy man who wanted to go to Titan.

George went off to set up meetings.

After a few minutes, she called him back in.

‘Look, George, things are going to start popping around here,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you what it is right now, but I want you to keep a log of the people I talk to. And keep it in a secure directory.’

After all, she reflected, they could be making history here, in the next few weeks and months. Maybe historians of the future would care enough to understand how this decision had come about.

Or, she thought in her gloomier moments, not.

George seemed intrigued, but complied without questioning.

She got to work.

Rosenberg called Paula from Hobby Airport, ten miles south-east of downtown Houston. His plane, from Pasadena, had landed a half-hour late, after four in the afternoon.

‘Get a cab to JSC,’ she told him. ‘I’ll pick you up in my car at security.’

Rosenberg hadn’t been out this way before. He stood waiting by the security gate on NASA Road One, staring with undisguised curiosity at the ageing black-and-white buildings.

From JSC she drove east with the home-bound rush-hour traffic, further out from Houston, heading for Clear Lake.

Benacerraf said, ‘You ought to do the tourist bit, while you’re here. Space Center Houston. They’ve got a terrific Mars-walk immersive VR. I’m told.’

‘I prefer RL.’

‘RL?’

‘You don’t get online much, do you?’

The road paralleled the north coast of Clear Lake, which was an inlet of Galveston Bay. They passed the glittering tower of the Nassau Bay Hilton, its glass walls coated with softscreen animated posters.

Rosenberg said, ‘We could be anywhere. Any coast area, anywhere. You wouldn’t think –’

‘I know.’ She stared at the shabby roadside buildings, the tough, scrub grass. ‘Erosion runs fast here,’ she said. ‘And now that the space effort is receding –’ and the wilder rumours now were that most of the NASA centers, JSC included, were to be mothballed ‘- all that erosion is going to have a field day. A hundred years from now, JSC will just be a cow pasture again.’

‘But a cow pasture with immersive VR facilities.’

Benacerraf lived in Shorewood Drive, a small road that curved parallel to the shore of Taylor Lake, itself an inlet of Clear Lake. This was the smart residential community called El Lago. Rosenberg stared out the window, without commenting.

She tried to see the little community through his eyes. Home town America, circa 1961: garages and air-conditioners and bicycles and shining lawns, the houses neat and dark with hints of ranch style, or mock Tudor flourishes, or discreet Spanish designs. Uniformly ersatz. Even the trees were all the same age, she realized now.

Give it up, Benacerraf. He’s probably thinking how much he needs to pee. El Lago is a dormitory for the Space Age, planned and artificial, no more, no less.

They reached her home. There were four other cars already parked in a ragged row along the side of the road: her other guests, arrived ahead of her, the rest of her team.

She observed Rosenberg sizing up the house.

It was a ranch house, an individually styled bungalow, wood framed with stone cladding. The trees, pine and fern, looked manicured. The lawn was luminous green in the last light of the sun, its little sprinkler heads glittering. At the back of the house was a small private jetty, with space for a couple of boats.

‘Nice,’ Rosenberg said neutrally.

She searched for her key. ‘Astronaut country, 1960s style. Nice if you come from Illinois. Or if you like the water.’

‘And you don’t?’

She shrugged. ‘I prefer Seattle. And I don’t sail. Anyhow this is rental only.’

‘Smart.’

‘Yes. Property prices have been falling like crazy around here, ever since Columbia.’

She fired the key’s infra-red beam at the door, and it swung open with a soft hiss of hydraulics.

Benacerraf’s housekeeper, Kevin, had let the rest of her guests in. When Benacerraf and Rosenberg arrived, the housekeeper served them drinks and began to lay out dinner.

The guests were gathered in the gazebo. It was a new kind of conservatory, connected to the house by a flexible joint, and mounted on a platform. It rotated to follow the sun, flower-like.

Rosenberg seemed to love it. ‘Bradbury,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Never mind. It’s just very appropriate.’

Everyone had turned up, Benacerraf noted with satisfaction: seven of them – Benacerraf herself with Rosenberg, Marcus White, Bill Angel, Barbara Fahy, and the two younger astronauts Benacerraf didn’t know so well, Siobhan Libet and Nicola Mott.

Marcus White grinned at Benacerraf. He was working through seven and sevens, and he looked oiled already. He grinned at Rosenberg, around a mouthful of peanuts, and the room’s candlelight caught the silvery stubble on his creased cheeks.

‘So, Rosenberg. You’re the asshole who wants to go to Titan. Why the hell?’

Rosenberg didn’t seem awed; he looked back levelly, holding his drink up before him. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘you tell me why you want to go.’

White snorted.

‘He has a point, Marcus.’ Benacerraf had already outlined the purpose of the dinner party. ‘Rosenberg thinks Titan is El Dorado, a treasure house of exotic chemicals, even life. But what about you? You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t interested yourself.’

White looked fleetingly embarrassed. To cover, he shovelled more peanuts into his mouth. ‘What the hell,’ he said, his lips shiny with grease. ‘If this comes off, it’s the first human flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17. And probably the last. Who wouldn’t want to go?’

‘Then there’s your reason,’ Bill Angel said. ‘Titan as Everest. We should go because it’s there. Why the hell not?’ Benacerraf watched him drain his glass again, his hand like a claw on the frosted surface.

She didn’t need to ask why Angel was here. He had no choice. He would find it easier to climb Everest, to go to Titan, than to face himself, alone in a room, with no goals left. She’d seen it before, a dozen times, in the Astronaut Office. The blight of the co-pilot. At least Marcus had the wisdom to know himself. The stories were Angel had been doing a lot of drinking since the Columbia incident.

But, she thought, he was competent.

The younger astronauts, Libet and Mott, seemed embarrassed; they dropped their eyes and worked steadily on their drinks.

Barbara Fahy cleared her throat. ‘The way I figure nobody is going the hell anywhere, let alone Titan.’ She looked around, at a circle of glum faces. ‘I mean it. It’s just unworkable.’

Benacerraf said mildly, ‘How so?’

Fahy said, ‘I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope figuring. How do you fly to Saturn? Saturn is ten times as far from the sun as Earth, remember. A Hohmann orbit, a minimum-energy transfer – which is all we could manage with chemical technology, which is all we got – would be a long, skinny ellipse touching Earth’s orbit at one extreme, and Saturn’s at the other. It would take six years to get there. Then you’d have to wait out a year at Saturn, until the planets got back into their correct alignment, and ride out the other half of the ellipse, back home. Total mission time thirteen years. Now, what size crew are you talking about? Five, six? How the hell are you going to supply and sustain a crew for a thirteen-year mission – all of it isolated from Earth? Christ, the longest missions we’ve run in Earth orbit without resupply are only a couple of months –’

‘ISRU,’ said Siobhan Libet.

Fahy looked at her. ‘Huh?’

Rosenberg said, ‘She’s right. In-situ resource utilization. You wouldn’t carry food for the Titan stopover. We’re landing, remember? There’s carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen down there. All sorts of organic and carbohydrate compounds.’

‘So that gets you through the year stopover. Maybe you could even resupply for the journey home,’ Fahy said. ‘But the main point still stands. You’d need to carry fuel to slow into Titan orbit. And all that fuel has to be hauled up and launched, in its turn, from an initial low Earth orbit. The numbers just multiply.

‘I figure you’re looking at millions of pounds of fuel to be hauled up to low Earth orbit. And the cargo capacity of the Shuttle to LEO is only sixty-five thousand pounds. Are you seriously proposing thirty, forty Shuttle missions?’

‘But you’d use gravity assists,’ Nicola Mott said. ‘Wouldn’t you? Like Cassini. You wouldn’t follow a simple Hohmann trajectory. You’d play the usual interplanetary pool: bounce off Earth, Venus, Jupiter maybe, and each time steal a little of their energy of rotation around the sun.’

‘Fine,’ said Angel thickly, ‘but if you’re talking about going in to Venus you’d have to carry sun-shields, and –’

‘Details,’ Marcus White said. ‘Fucking details. You always were a windy bastard, Angel.’

Angel grinned. He said, ‘Okay. But even if you cut your initial mass in LEO by, say, fifty per cent, you’re still looking at dozens of Shuttle launches. And there’s no way Hadamard would back such a mission.’

Barbara Fahy sighed. ‘He’s right, I’m afraid.’

‘No, he isn’t,’ Isaac Rosenberg said. ‘You’re making the wrong assumptions.’

Angel said, ‘Huh?’

Rosenberg said mildly, ‘What if you don’t come home?’

There was a long silence.

Kevin, the housekeeper, called them to eat.

The meal was set up in small china dishes on candle-heated plate-warmers, all arranged on a big rotating serving platform on top of Benacerraf’s favourite piece of furniture, her walnut dining table. There was hot and sour soup, spare ribs, chicken in ginger, quorn with spring onions, Szechuan prawns, and a variety of rice and noodle plates; there was water, beer and wine on the table.

Angel drained his glass again. ‘That kid of yours fixes a good drink,’ he said.

‘Yes. He’s a good cook, too.’

White said, ‘What is he, working his way through college?’

‘… Something like that.’ She left it there. She doubted that White, who’d spent his adult life in the monkish confines of the space program, would understand much more.

Kevin, from Galveston, was a pleasant, plump boy, twenty-three years old, already a college graduate. Actually he was earning his keep while he paid off his college debt, and pursued his art.

Benacerraf had given him a garage, to use as a studio. Once, Kevin had shown Benacerraf his work. It was sculpture. The main piece was a large block of rendered animal-fat, made into a half-scale self-portrait of Kevin. The statue showed Kevin lowering his shorts and stroking his own genitals. The statue hadn’t been carved; Kevin had gnawed it, crudely, with his teeth. The marks of the teeth were clearly visible, especially where Kevin had used his chipped left incisor. Kevin explained that this was only a sketch; the final version would be made of human fat liposuctioned from his own body. Or maybe his faeces.

Benacerraf didn’t go back into the garage after that.

The thing of it was, Kevin didn’t have any other skills. He was a college graduate; his degree had been in recursive and self-referential art, with special studies of the greats of the 1990s: Janine Antoni, Sean Landers, Gregory Green, Charles Long.

Demographic projections for Kevin’s age-group – with modern medical care, preventative programs, reduced-calorie dieting and prosthetics – predicted a full century of active life ahead of him. That, thought Benacerraf, provided time for a lot of shit-gnawing.

At that, gnawing shit was better than creating nothing at all, which was to be the fate, as far as Benacerraf could see, of most of Kevin’s generation, as they lay in their VR-beds and pushed increasingly stale, second-hand information around the net.

Kevin, anyhow, was a satisfactory housekeeper. Benacerraf paid his wages, and tried not to think about his future. She didn’t see what else she could do for him, or the millions like him, unemployed and unemployable …

The seven of them gathered around the table and began to spoon food into their small bowls. Everyone but Marcus White opted to use chopsticks.

Benacerraf, looking around at the ring of relaxed, candlelit faces, felt pleased. There was a warm, friendly, domestic atmosphere here; they were seven humans, rooted to the Earth, enjoying a shared ritual that dated back to the emergence of humanity.

Her purpose, tonight, was to try to build this group into a team, who would have to work together to achieve something no other humans had attempted – and, if, impossibly, this proposal came to fruition, some of whom might soon depart the Earth forever.

She still hadn’t decided whether to put her weight behind this dumb-ass Titan proposal. Up to now, it had just been a hobby, something to take her mind off the hierarchy of Flight Readiness Review records from STS – 143. The reaction of the group, tonight, could decide that.

They started talking about Titan again.

Nicola Mott said, ‘Let me go through this again. From the top. You’re seriously suggesting that we send a manned mission. That we travel one way, to colonize Titan.’

‘Why not?’ Rosenberg said. ‘Maybe we’re done with dipping our toes in the water and running.’

‘Like with Apollo,’ Marcus White said heavily.

‘Like with Apollo.’

Rosenberg said, ‘Look, the whole point of this proposal is that we’re going to prove that a colony on Titan would be viable. More than that: it would soon become an actual economic asset to the United States, to Earth. How are we going to do that, if we aren’t prepared to put ourselves on the line, give up a few home comforts?’ He sounded irritated, frustrated at his inability to communicate, their inability to see. ‘We go out there to stay for years, we build a home, we survive until a retrieval capability is put together. We cannibalize the ship that carries us, turn it into surface shelters. We use ISRU, as Siobhan says. We make Titan such an attractive place that resupply and retrieval missions have to follow.’

Marcus White said, ‘ “We”, Rosenberg?’

‘Yes.’ He looked uncomfortable, the candlelight shining from his glasses. ‘If there’s a ship going to Titan, I want to be on it. I’m best qualified. Isn’t that what this is all about?’

White grinned. ‘Hell, yes. I’d go myself.’

In the silence that followed, the others stared at him.

‘When I walked on that lava plain south of Copernicus, with Tom Lamb, I sure as hell never figured I’d only get the one shot at it. There would have been an extended-Apollo program, with lunar orbital missions, and long-stay shelters hauled up by dual-launched Saturn Vs, and all the rest. And then more: flyby flights to Venus and Mars, the space station, permanent colonies on the Moon, eventually landing flights to Mars itself …

‘But the whole damn thing shut down, even before Armstrong stepped out at Tranquillity.’ He put down his drink, and the fingers of his big hands knitted together, restless. ‘I must have talked about my Moon trip a thousand times. Ten thousand. And the one thing I’ve never managed to put over is how it feels not to be able to get back. Ever.’ He grinned at Benacerraf, embarrassed, uneasy. ‘They should shoot us poor fucking Moonwalkers in the head. Anyhow, it won’t be me. I realize that. Christ, I’m seventy-four years old, already. I’m a grandpa three times over. But I’ll tell you, I’d just like to see one more guy lift off out of the gravity well and go someplace – plant Old Glory on one more moon – before the last of us sad old Apollo geezers dies of old age.’

‘And,’ Mott pressed, ‘if we don’t succeed? – if Earth doesn’t jump for the bait? If we set out, and they just let the space facilities rust? What then?’

Marcus White leaned toward Mott over the table. ‘The question for you is, having heard that – would you go?’

Mott thought for a moment. She opened her mouth.

But, Benacerraf noted, she didn’t immediately say no.

White leaned back. ‘You know, they used to ask us a question like that, during our interviews for the Astronaut Office. Marcus, would you submit to a two-year journey to Mars? Suppose I tell you that the chances of surviving the trip are one in two. Do you go? Absolutely not, said I. One in ten, maybe.’ He looked at Mott. ‘I got it right. The point was partly to see how dumb I was, how foolhardy. But also to find out if I had it in me.’

‘What?’

‘Wanderlust.’

Rosenberg said, ‘Being an astronaut on this mission won’t be just another job, a line on your résumé. This will be about going somewhere, where nobody else has ever been. Making a difference. What the job used to be about.’

White laughed. ‘That,’ he said, ‘and glory, and fast cars, and the women.’

‘I get it,’ Siobhan Libet said. ‘This isn’t Apollo. It’s a Mayflower option.’

‘Maybe,’ Barbara Fahy murmured. ‘The Mayflower colonists went because they had to. They did it because they couldn’t find a place to fit, at home.’

Marcus White grunted. ‘There sure as hell has been little enough room on Earth for astronauts, since 1972.’

Rosenberg said, ‘The costs don’t have to defeat us. We don’t need any massive technical development. We use chemical propulsion, existing technology wherever possible. For instance, the Space Station hab module for the journey shelter.’

Benacerraf nodded confirmation of that. ‘The thing’s been sitting in a hangar at Boeing, intact, since 1999. It wouldn’t take much modification …’

Rosenberg said, ‘You’d wrap a cut-down Shuttle orbiter around it. With the hab module in the cargo bay, you’d use the orbiter’s OMS and RCS for course corrections, and the main engines for the interplanetary injections.’