Voyage

In his rapid Bronx delivery Seger gave them a little pep talk: about the need for open discussion, for receptivity, and for a willingness for all here to walk out of this room with a consensus behind whatever mode was favored. Dana could see a little crucifix glinting on Seger’s lapel, under a wilting pink carnation.

Dana doubted that anyone missed the subtext of what Seger was saying. Congress was approving the requested funding for NASA’s FY1972, but the big expenditure for whatever program was settled on was going to start in FY1973. And President Nixon still hadn’t made up his mind about the future of the space program. It was said he might even can manned spaceflight altogether, and look for some superscience stunt on Earth that might prove a better fit with the mood of the times.

Meanwhile there was open warfare going on between two of NASA’s centers, Houston and Marshall, over their preferred Mars modes.

It was just what NASA didn’t need right now, and all the old hands at NASA had been here before, too many times. Dana knew that Seger had already been trying to get around the conflict by encouraging informal contacts and discussions, and by having the Houston people help with the devising of Marshall’s presentation, and so forth. And it was obvious that Seger’s intention today was to lance that boil before sending the recommendations further up the chain of command.

Now Seger flashed up a draft agenda. The meeting was going to run for the whole day. The two major modes – chemical and nuclear – would be presented first, followed by the other studies …

Dana found with dismay that his would be the last of the five major presentations. I’m coming at the nutty end, he realized. Even after the guys from General Dynamics with their ludicrous atomic-bomb motor. I’m being wheeled on as light relief. In the midst of this organizational in-fighting, he was going to be squeezed out; he had probably upset too many people by circumventing the hierarchy. He felt his stomach knot up with frustration and anxiety. Damn it, I know I’m right, that I have the way we should be going to Mars, right here in this folder. He pushed his spectacles up onto his nose, agitated.

First up was the nuclear rocket option.

Dana thought the timing was significant; this option, heavily pushed by Marshall, was, he had heard, the preferred option amongst the NASA brass.

The presentation was opened by a hairy young man called Mike Conlig. Conlig reported into Marshall now, but he had worked for several years at the nuclear rocket development station in Nevada. ‘We’ve achieved twenty-eight starts of our XE-Prime liquid hydrogen prototype, running up in excess of fifty-five thousand pounds of thrust.’ Conlig showed a photograph of an ungainly test rig, framed by dismal mountains. ‘Next we will proceed to the development of NERVA 1, which will develop seventy-five thousand pounds of thrust. Then the full NERVA 2 module will be developed, to support the Mars mission itself. NERVA 2 will be flight tested in the mid 1970s, in fact launched into orbit as a new Saturn V third stage …’

Conlig spoke well and enthusiastically; Dana let the data rattle through his head.

Now a slim, cold-looking man, his blond hair speckled with gray, walked to the stage. ‘To achieve the necessary performance for interplanetary travel, we have evolved a “building block” technology, in which separate NERVA propulsion modules will be launched into Earth orbit, and clustered to achieve different requirements …’ The voice was shallow, a little clipped – overlaid by a disconcerting Alabama drawl, after all these years at Huntsville – but still underpinned by sharp Teutonic consonants.

This was Hans Udet: Udet, who had worked at Peenemunde with von Braun, and now one of von Braun’s senior people at Marshall.

Dana showed no reaction.

Dana had dealt with the Huntsville Germans many times, over his years at NASA. And even now he recognized many faces from those ancient days in the Harz Mountains, here in the halls and offices of NASA.

But he had never been recognized, in his turn – why should he be? – and he had never volunteered his identity. He had mentioned this antique link to no one. The Mittelwerk was buried deep in the past, and they had all moved on to new concerns.

He’d never even discussed that part of his past with Jim.

But he had never lost his sense of inferiority, before these confident, clever Germans.

Udet put up foils showing two identical ships, to be assembled in Earth orbit. There would be four or six crew in each ship. The ships would be boosted out of orbit by disposable NERVA modules, and then docked nose-to-nose for the flight to Mars. Udet flashed up summaries of mission weights, flight durations, development costs and other key parameters. ‘Our baseline study,’ Udet said, ‘will allow us to launch to Mars in November 1981 …’

It was a huge, grandiose scenario. Typical von Braun, Dana thought: unimaginative, brute force, over-engineered.

Bert Seger opened the presentation up for questions. The hostile Houston contingent put in a lot of detailed probing about the untried nuclear technology: the difficulties of clustering the nuclear modules, progress on the advanced cooling techniques needed. There were also questions about the significance of the treaties banning atmospheric testing of nuclear technology; it seemed to Dana that these issues were still unresolved.

Seger let the questions run on for some time – well over the option’s allotted slot – and then orchestrated a round of applause. All this reinforced Dana’s view that this was the mode preferred within NASA, unofficially, and Seger had a brief to make sure that it was fully understood and accepted.

The second major presentation was of an all-chemical-engine mode. It was prepared by Rockwell, and championed by Houston staff. Rockwell were, incidentally, the favorites to be selected as lead contractor for the Space Shuttle.

The mission profile, Dana soon saw, was close to the classic minimum-energy Hohmann transfer profile he’d sketched out to Jim, that day in the shop at the back of his house in Hampton.

The chemical mode had some advantages. The development program would be comparatively cheap, since the hardware would be based on incremental upgrades of Saturn technology, for example the use of an enhanced Saturn second stage to serve as an orbital injection booster.

But the nuclear camp from Marshall, led by Udet and Conlig, didn’t find it hard to pick holes in the case. Compared to the NERVA profile, twice as much mass would have to be hurled into Earth orbit, for a mission twice the length. Chemical technology couldn’t manage much better than that. Not without imagination, anyway, Dana thought; not if you stick to direct transfer …

Dana knew that most of the points raised in the discussion were a repeat of the sterile arguments which had plagued NASA for some months.

At the end of the question session Seger didn’t call for any applause.

Lunch turned out to be steak and chicken served buffet style. The debate continued during the meal, with delegates making points by jabbing bits of steak or fried potato at each other.

Dana spotted the sleek, handsome figure of Wernher von Braun himself. He was talking to an astronaut: Joe Muldoon, a moonwalker, tall, erect, his thinning, gray-blond hair clipped to military neatness.

Few people spoke to the obscure little man from Langley with his peculiar presentation. Venus swingby modes? What the hell is that about? That suited Dana. He left the lunch early and returned to his seat in the hall; he didn’t much like steak anyway.

* * *

The conference looked at two more options, before Dana’s pitch. Both of these were more ambitious, technically, than either the main chemical or nuclear options reviewed earlier; Dana suspected they had been explored just to make sure nothing obvious was missed before the primary mode was selected.

A representative of McDonnell presented a so-called nuclear-electric option, together with representatives of NASA and ARPA, the Government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Plasma – a charged gas – would be accelerated electrodynamically out of a rocket nozzle. A plasma rocket’s thrust was tiny, but would last for months; plasma rockets would move spaceflight techniques away, at last, from the antique Jules Verne kick-and-coast model. The technology was unproven, but there had been some trials; an electric rocket had been operated at high altitude as long ago as 1964.

The McDonnell man flashed up a conceptual design for a manned nuclear-electric ship. It was a staggering arrangement, like a three-armed windmill. Two of the arms – each fifty yards long – contained reactors, and the third the habitable section. The rockets were mounted at the hub of the rotor, and the whole thing was designed to spin about the hub, to provide artificial gravity. It would be, Dana thought, like a great metal snowflake, spinning toward Mars. It was a terrific concept, and utterly impractical.

Next up was a project manager from General Dynamics. He got to his feet with a broad grin gleaming from out of a Californian tan. ‘I got to tell you,’ he told the audience deadpan, ‘that I can beat you NERVA folks hands-down. With two million pounds in Earth orbit I can get to Mars and back in just two hundred and fifty days – not much more than half your time – and taking no fewer than twenty guys. Gentlemen, I give you Project Put-Put.’

The idea was to throw one-kiloton nuclear bombs out of the back of the spacecraft – thirty devices every second – and let them off, a thousand feet behind the ship. The shocks would be absorbed through water-cooled springs, and the ship would be driven forward. ‘Like setting off firecrackers behind a tin can. Am I right?’

The concept seemed ridiculous, but General Dynamics had done some preliminary studies, called ‘Project Orion,’ in the early 1960s, and the presenter was able to show photographs of a small flight-test model which had used high explosives to hurl itself a few hundred feet into the air.

The technical problems were all around the high temperature flux on the rocket’s back end structure, which would have to radiate away excess heat between explosions. And of course the system had one major drawback, the General Dynamics man said, and that was the radioactive exhaust. But that hadn’t seemed such an obstacle back in 1960 when the first Orion studies had been initiated. Then, it was thought that the unscrupulous Soviets might use this quick-and-dirty method to short-cut to space, so we had to look at it too.

The General Dynamics man joshed and wisecracked his way through his talk. When he sat down he got the biggest hand of the day.

Dana felt himself shrink into his seat. How the hell do I follow that?

When he got to the podium Dana shuffled with his notes and foils, trying to avoid looking out over the sea of sleek suits before him. There was a spotlight on him; it seemed to impale him. It was already four thirty, and after the General Dynamics pitch the delegates had lost concentration; they were still laughing, talking.

Dana began to read from his notes. ‘Manned Mars stopover missions of duration twelve to twenty-four months are characterized by Earth return velocities of up to seventy thousand feet per second, over the cycle of mission opportunities. A promising mode for reducing Earth entry velocities to forty to fifty thousand feet per second, without increasing spacecraft gross weight, is the swingby through the gravitational field of Venus. Studies indicate that this technique can be applied to all Mars mission opportunities, and in one-third of them, the propulsion requirements actually can be reduced below minimum direct mode requirements …’

There was a ripple of reaction in the audience, a restless shifting. Dana ploughed on. He felt sweat start over his brow, around his collar.

He hurried through the idea of gravity assist. He tried to emphasize the history and intellectual weight of the idea, showing that his own computations had built on the work of others. ‘The concept within NASA of using a Venus swingby to reach Mars dates back to Hollister and Sohn, working independently, who published in 1963 and 1964. This was further elaborated by Sohn, and by Deerwester, who presented exhaustive results graphically in a format compatible with the direct flight curves in the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook …’

It was a little like a game of interplanetary pool, he said. A spacecraft would dive in so close to a planet that its path would be altered by that world’s gravitational field. In the swingby – the bounce off the planet – the spacecraft would extract energy from the planet’s revolution around the sun, and so speed up; in exchange, the planet’s year would be minutely changed.

In practical terms, bouncing off a planet’s gravity well was like enjoying the benefit of an additional rocket stage at no extra cost, if your navigation was good enough.

‘We have already studied the Mariner Mercury mission, which would have swung by Venus en route to Mercury. A direct journey would have been possible, using for example a Titan IIIC booster; but the gravity assist would have allowed the use of the cheaper Atlas-Centaur launch system …’

‘Yeah,’ a voice called from the audience, ‘but Mariner Mercury got canned. And there were no men on it anyhow!’

Laughter.

Dana pressed on, brushing the sweat from his eyes. There were two ways Venus could be used to get to Mars, he said. The spacecraft could swing by Venus outbound, and use Venus’s gravity to accelerate it toward Mars. Or Venus could be used to decelerate the craft, on its way back to Earth.

‘First estimates show a mass in Earth orbit of two million pounds would be required for a mission duration of six hundred and forty days.’ Same weight as nuclear; two-thirds the trip time of chemical. ‘Thus a mission profile close to optimal is delivered, without the need for ambitious new technologies, and hence significantly reduced development costs compared to other candidate modes …’

And it’s elegant. Don’t you see that? No brute force here: no huge nuclear V-2s. Just proven technology, and elegance, and style. A little thought, gentlemen.

‘In conclusion, it has been shown that the Venus swingby mode is generally applicable to all of the Mars flyby and stopover round trip launch opportunities, with very favorable benefits.’

Dana stepped back from the podium, retreating from the glare of the light. He was numbed, a little giddy, unable to feel his hands or face.

Seger thanked him, then opened up for questions; with a glance at his watch he signaled that these should be brief. ‘… What about guidance and navigation? Don’t you realize that you’re now talking about devising a mission profile with possibly four planetary encounters? – Mars, Venus maybe twice, and Earth on return? And at each encounter the accuracy of positioning will have to be of the order of a few hundred miles, after traveling tens of millions. How can we navigate so accurately? Why, we haven’t yet proved we can manage a single swingby on such a scale.’

‘But we will,’ Dana insisted. ‘Remember, NASA committed to the lunar-orbit rendezvous mode for Apollo – which required a rendezvous a quarter of a million miles from home – before a single space rendezvous had been demonstrated.’

There was some muttering at this. Hardly a valid comparison.

‘What about the design constraints? Near Venus the sunlight is four times hotter than at Mars, so you’ll be sacrificing payload space for a cooling system that will be dead weight at Mars. And there’ll be problems with the increased level of radiation coming from the sun …’

Dana tried to answer – I’ve incorporated spacecraft design modifications into my weights analysis, and … But he was all but drowned out by the noise of an audience which had little interest in him.

Now Hans Udet stood up, and a hush gathered. Udet said precisely, ‘On what basis have you arrived at your figures? I am aware of the preliminary analyses of the complicated mission classes you describe. I am aware of no detailed analyses which show the savings you claim.’

Dana began to stammer out a reply. But our understanding of spacecraft systems has advanced since those early studies, and with the figures I have compiled, we can now show that –

‘These results are false.’ Udet glanced around at the audience, tall, aristocratic, in control, charming even now. ‘This is obvious. The figures we are shown are based on unstated suppositions. The speaker doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It may be incompetence, or malice, whatever. We should not expend further energy on this red herring.’ He sat down, his back ramrod-straight.

There was an uncomfortable stirring in the audience, some nervous laughter.

Bert Seger got to his feet, quickly thanked Dana, and turned away from him.

Udet’s words were incredible to Dana. Such accusations should not be made, in such fora as these, or beyond. It is – uncivilized. Somehow, though, now that it had happened, there seemed a certain inevitability about it all. Of course, I have been rejected. But this isn’t about logic, or engineering, or science. It was because he’d gone outside the hierarchy, the formal channels. This really is about power. In-fighting. It’s possible Udet is even sincere. Maybe he really does think I’ve cooked up these numbers, that I’m just infighting for Langley.

Dana gathered together’ his foils, clumsily, and got off the stage.

The lights went up, and the conference room was quiet. Bert Seger got to his feet and began stalking along the stage, eyeballing the delegates as if challenging them, his hands on his hips.

‘I’ve heard a lot of good things today about the nuclear mode,’ he said. ‘And I’ve heard nothing else today, frankly, that makes a hell of a lot of sense to me in comparison.’ He glared at the audience. ‘Now, I have to say that I think we can do this. I think we do indeed have a “Kennedy option” to present to the President. And I’d like to hear now what sonofabitch thinks nuclear isn’t the right thing to do.’

There was a little more to and fro. Wernher von Braun got to his feet to make a brief statement commending the nuclear option. Then one of the chemical option presenters from Houston got up, and graciously conceded defeat to the guys from Marshall.

Seger closed the meeting. ‘Gentlemen, I want to thank you here for all the work you’ve done. I think we’ve found a way we can work together and do this thing. I think we’ve worked out how we’re going to Mars.’

He started to clap, then; and the hall joined in, applauding themselves for their achievement.

All but Dana. At least he could resist that much.

The Germans had won again.

Seger might be right. Perhaps we’ve made a historic decision that will, indeed, take men to Mars within my lifetime. But it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.

Anyhow, he thought, it’s still possible this huge mission will never be funded. Perhaps Nixon will choose to build the Shuttle. Or nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

The applause went on, until the delegates started to cheer themselves.

FUTURE OF NASA

Present tentative plans call for major reductions or change in NASA by sharply reducing the balance of the manned space program and many remaining NASA programs.

I believe this would be a mistake.

1)The real reason for reductions in the NASA budget is that NASA is entirely in the 28% of the budget that is controllable. In short we cut because it is cuttable, not because it is doing a bad job or an unnecessary one.

2)We are being driven, by the uncontrollable items, to spend more and more on programs that offer no real hope for the future: welfare, interest on National Debt, Medicare, etc. Essentially they are programs not of our choice, designed to repair mistakes of the past.

3)There is real merit to the future of NASA and to its proposed programs. Skylab and NERVA particularly offer the opportunity, among other things, to secure substantial scientific fall-out for the civilian economy at the same time that large numbers of valuable (and hard to employ elsewhere) scientists and technicians are kept at work on projects that increase our knowledge of space. It is very difficult to reassemble the NASA teams should it be decided later, after major stoppages, to restart some of the long-range programs.

4)In response to our pressure NASA has reduced its requested development budget for the next several fiscals by half.

5) Apollo 14 was very successful from all points of view. Most important is the fact that it gave the American people a much needed lift in spirit (and the people of the world an equally needed look at American superiority). Announcement now that we were canceling or severely diminishing the US manned space program would have a very bad effect. It would be confirming in some respects a belief that I fear is gaining credence at home and abroad, that our best years are behind us, that we are turning inward, reducing our defense commitments, and voluntarily starting to give up our superpower status, and our desire to maintain world superiority.

America should be able to afford something besides increased welfare …

Handwritten addendum: I agree with Cap. RMN.

Caspar W. Weinberger, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Memorandum to the President, August 27, 1971. White House, Richard M. Nixon, President, 1968–1971 File, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC

Wednesday, December 1, 1971 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena

Ben Priest swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista, heading past the Rose Bowl. His hired car was an antique Dodge, and its heating was malfunctioning; outside it was a cold December day, and York alternately baked and shivered.

‘This seems a long way out of Pasadena,’ she remarked.

He grinned. ‘Yeah. Well, they used to test rocket engines here. Everyone thought the place would be dangerous, so they built it way the hell out there, in the arroyo. And then they built a sprawling, expensive suburb all around it.’

York saw that office buildings filled the arroyo; some of them were drab boxes, but there was also an imposing tower of steel and glass.

There were cars parked for a quarter mile along the road leading to JPL, and the street outside the press center was nearly blocked by TV vans.

There was a guard at the JPL entrance; he waved them into a parking lot. It seemed to York that pretty much every space was taken.

They got inside quickly; the cold seemed to be deepening. Priest guided her through corridors littered with computer cards and print-outs. Close-up photographs of the Moon’s surface were casually framed and stuck on the walls. JPL seemed a strange hybrid; this might have been any office complex anywhere, York supposed, except that people were younger than the average – and not one of them wore a suit, or a tie – and there was a lot of hair about, bristling above yellow Smile buttons. Some of the women even wore hot pants. But at the same time the place didn’t have the ragged, laid-back feel of a college; there was too much urgency for that. There was a sense that things happened here.

She remarked on how full the car park had been.

Priest said, ‘You should have been here a week ago, when the first pictures began coming through from Mars. You couldn’t move for press guys, and VIPs, and politicos, and science fiction writers – anybody and everybody who could scrounge a pass.’ He laughed. ‘You should have seen their faces, when all we got back was a picture of the dust-storm.’