Voyage

Thursday, June 7, 1973 Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston (formerly Manned Spacecraft Center)

Phil Stone was the first to understand Seger’s suggestion.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘You’re going to send us to the Moon. Aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’m considering. I want to reassign your mission a Saturn V, and send you to lunar orbit.’

Chuck Jones stared at Seger, astonishment crinkling up his squat face. ‘Like hell you will.’

For long seconds, the three of them sat in silence.

Stone felt stunned; here in this sterile, mundane office, on an ordinary Thursday morning, it was impossible to absorb such news.

Skylab B, the second Earth-orbital Saturn Wet Workshop, was to have been Stone’s first flight into space. He’d already been training on the science and operational aspects of the mission for months. And now Seger was thinking of changing it all around, and sending him to the Moon? Jesus.

Seger played with the carnation in his lapel. ‘You got to look at the bigger picture. The NERVA is slipping again, so its program of test flights is being cut. And that’s freed up a Saturn V. And we need to use it, or we’ll lose it. And I want to use it to send you boys to lunar orbit.’

Stone frowned. ‘It’s a man-rated Saturn V, for God’s sake. It’s already built. How can we lose it?’

Seger shrugged. ‘We may have built the thing, but we haven’t yet spent the money to make it fly.’

‘We can’t go to the fucking Moon,’ Chuck Jones said. ‘We’re still waiting on the J-2S.’ Lunar orbital workshops were planned, but a few years down the road, following extensive modifications to the S-IVB: the upgraded J-2S main engine, additional payload capacity, a self-ullaging system, electrical heating blankets and mylar insulation, additional batteries, upgraded electronics … ‘The fucking S-IVB doesn’t have the power to inject itself into lunar orbit.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t need to. Look at this.’ Seger had a glossy presentation on his desk; he handed them copies.

Stone looked quickly. It was a summary of an old McDonnell-Douglas study called LASSO – Lunar Applications on a Spent S-IVB Stage (Orbital). It showed how Saturn components could be used to establish lunar orbit workshops of varying complexity and weight. It was full of cutaway isometric diagrams and color pictures and big bold bullet-point blocks of text, and – naturally, as it came from the manufacturers of the S-IVB – it was relentlessly optimistic: some of the projected dates were already in the past.

‘Look at Baseline 1.’ Seger pointed to sections of the presentation. ‘That shows how we can take a workshop to lunar orbit without the J-2S upgrade, or any of the rest of it …’

A Saturn V would be launched looking superficially like those for the Apollo landing flights. But instead of a Lunar Module, the booster would carry an airlock module, fixed to the front of the third stage.

The S-IVB would send the spacecraft toward the Moon. Just like the landing missions. But, once exhausted, the third stage wouldn’t be discarded. The Apollo would decouple and dock with the empty stage via the airlock adapter. The stack would follow a long, lower-energy trajectory to the Moon: a day and a half more than the three-day landing flights. Then the Apollo Service Module’s main engine would be used to brake the whole stack into lunar orbit.

The empty stage would have the same weight and dynamic characteristics, roughly, as a loaded LM. So an Apollo would indeed be able to deliver it to lunar orbit. The only modifications needed for the S-IVB would be the usual passivation and neutralization kit – equipment to turn the stage from a dry fuel can into a working station – and equipment brackets and pallets. Enough supplies could be carried for a four-week stay in lunar orbit, and the station would be refurbished for later crews.

As he read, Stone began to see the feasibility of it. It could, he realized, be done. But …

‘Why?’

Jones looked up from his own reading; Seger fixed Stone with a glare.

‘Why what?’

‘Why are we doing this, Bert? It’s just a stunt. We’ll have to cut out so much to save weight we’ll be compromising a lot of our science objectives for Skylab B.’

‘I know about the science, Phil. But we can send all that stuff up on the second crew flight, can’t we? And your flight will simply turn into a more limited engineering trip, with less emphasis on the science.’ Seger was a thin, intense man, with black, slicked-back hair and an Irish darkness; Stone found him unnerving. ‘If you’re in my chair, Phil, you have to look at the benefits for the program as a whole. Beyond your one mission alone. Yes, it will be a stunt. But a hell of a stunt. It will put us right back on top of everything …’

Jones talked now about the training they’d already completed toward their Earth-orbital mission. ‘And what about the Russians?’ The Soviets were proposing to dock a Soyuz ship with Skylab B in Earth orbit. ‘Changing that stunt around to a lunar-orbit rendezvous mission is a hell of a trick,’ Jones said. ‘I mean, the Russkies haven’t lifted a single cosmonaut out of Earth orbit yet.’

‘The Soviets still say they’ll have at least a circumlunar capability in a couple of years – within the life of the station,’ Seger said. ‘So we can get around that. And even if we can’t, maybe we could downgrade the Russian thing into a simple dock with an Apollo in Earth orbit. Anyhow, never mind the damn Russians. Chuck, you’ll be hanging out over the edge. Fitting out a station in lunar orbit. Nobody’s done anything remotely like that before. I thought a challenge might appeal.’

Jones looked thoughtful.

Stone knew Seger was pressing the right buttons, as far as Jones was concerned. The thought depressed him.

Stone could see Seger’s point, to some extent. Morale in NASA had been low, paradoxically, since the Mars decision. A lot of staff had been geared up to the abandoned Space Shuttle program, which they’d seen as new and exciting, technically; by comparison, the Skylabs looked like an extension of 1963 state-of-the-art. And the continuing budget cuts had put endless pressure on the Agency’s ambitions.

If you counted contract staff, only a hundred thousand people were still working on space programs, compared to a peak of half a million during Apollo. There had even been a program of terminations, at Houston, Marshall and the other main centers.

Meanwhile NASA had run into a lot of flak over the first orbital workshop, Skylab A. Pete Conrad had led the first set-up mission to open up Skylab. But then the second crew had been military, a consolation for the DoD after the Shuttle cancelation. Ken Mattingly, an Apollo veteran, had led a crew of military astronauts – Manned Spaceflight Engineers – through a secretive program testing ‘Terra Scout’ and ‘Battleview’ surveillance equipment, radiation monitoring gear, encrypted communications beams. Every previous NASA flight had been completely open; it had been a deliberate and popular policy going back to Kennedy.

And, meanwhile, US intelligence had learned that Soviet cosmonauts in Salyuts had overseen military exercises in Eastern Siberia, sending down real-time tactical information to battlefield commanders.

A lot of people thought this militarization of space was a deeply shitty development, a fall away from the dream of Apollo. And Jack Kennedy had attacked it, publicly.

So maybe Seger was right that a morale-raising stunt was a good idea at this point. But it would be a stunt.

Stone had a military background himself. But he hadn’t come into the space program to play spies in space, or to fly stunts. For him, this proposal was a sour compromise. Screw the science, for the sake of the politics. Just like the old days.

And, to him, it didn’t say a lot for Seger’s sound judgment.

Now Seger cut the discussion short. ‘Chuck, Phil, every so often you’ve got to take a chance like this. To go back to the Moon so soon would be a hell of a thing for us. A hell of a thing. The nation needs a boost right now: why, you’ve got two White House aides testifying in the Senate against the President right this minute. And as for the risks, remember, they flew Apollo 8 to the Moon and back on only the second manned Apollo, the first manned Saturn V, and the first V to fly after the unmanned Apollo 6, which was a shambles …’

Stone understood now. Seger had been reading his history. This is Bert’s Apollo 8. Back to the Moon! A grandiose stunt: a way to make his mark. And Skylab B is to be sacrificed for it.

Seger was saying, ‘Just think what a hell of a lift it will give us when you’re successful …’

‘If, Bert,’ Jones said. ‘If.’

When he’d thought it over, Stone still wasn’t happy.

But he wanted to fly in space. If he was going to have to swallow this ill-thought-out, gung ho crap to do it, then that was the price he would pay.

And anyhow – Stone reflected, in the midst of the revised, hectic training schedule – he kind of liked the idea of going to the Moon …

Friday, July 20, 1973 Mason City, Iowa

The piece was splashed over the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post. Ralph Gershon sat in the public library of his home town, reading it over and over.

… American B-52 bombers dropped about 104,000 tons of explosives on Communist sanctuaries in neutralist Cambodia during a series of raids in 1969 and 1970 … The secret bombing was acknowledged by the Pentagon the Monday after a former Air Force major described how he falsified reports on Cambodia air operations and destroyed records on the bombing missions actually flown …

Ralph Gershon felt a deep satisfaction. At last it was coming out.

He was convinced all that covert crap had worked against his career progression in the years since. Maybe it had also killed off the tentative feelers he’d put out about getting into the space program. That and the color of his goddamn skin. Maybe there were people afraid of what he might say, if he got to be a public figure, right? Well, now at last it was all going to be out in the open, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

He made his decision, sitting there in the musty heat of the library’s reference section, with some old guy opposite him drooling in his sleep. As soon as he got back to his squadron he’d start progressing a new application to NASA.

Before he got up he read some more about how Ehrlichman and Haldeman were going to have to testify in front of the Senate. At last, he thought: at last that asshole Nixon was getting his.

Erosion by Catastrophic Floods on Mars and Earth

Ronald R. Victor (Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas at Austin), Natalie B. York (Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley)

Received March 18, 1974; revised October 6, 1974.

ABSTRACT:

The large Martian channels, especially Kasei, Ares, Tiu, Simud and Mangala Valles, show morphological features strikingly similar to those of ‘Channeled Scabland.’ Features in the overall pattern include the great size, regional anastomosis, and low sinuosity of the channels. Erosional features are streamlined hills, longitudinal grooves, inner channel cataracts, scour upstream of flow obstacles, and perhaps marginal cataracts and butte and basin topography. Depositional features are bar complexes in expanding reaches and perhaps pendant bars and alcove bars.

Scabland erosion takes place in exceedingly deep, swift floodwater acting on closely jointed bedrock as a hydrodynamic consequence of secondary flow phenomena, including various forms of macro-turbulent vortices and flow separations. If the analogy to the Channeled Scablands is correct, floods involving water discharges of millions of cubic meters per second and peak flow velocities of tens of meters per second, but lasting perhaps no more than a few days, have occurred on Mars …

FromThe Bulletin of Geophysical Research, vol. 23, pp. 27–41 (1974). Copyright 1974 by Academia Press, Inc.; all rights reserved.

July, 1976 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena

Later, York would pinpoint the divergence in the trajectory of her life to a couple of days in the middle of 1976.

After that point, things just seemed to unravel, for her, as she fell toward a new destiny.

York wished she had something to drink. Even with all the windows open, the sun beating down on the roof made the car as hot as hell. Her sunglasses kept slipping down her nose, and every time she rested her arm on the sill of the window frame she burned her skin.

She rattled her nails on the steering wheel, waiting for Ben Priest.

In the middle of the aimless mess of her life, she seemed to be regressing, to some kind of childhood.

She’d had a huge image of Mars taped to her bedroom wall, a black and white photomosaic compiled from fifteen hundred Mariner 9 photographs, with the scar of Olympus Mons square at the center. At least, she’d had it there until Mike had made her take it down. He said Olympus Mons looked like a huge nipple.

And now here she was hanging around at the gates of JPL – without a security pass – like a goddamn groupie, hoping to get an early look at the Soviets’ new pictures from the Martian surface.

At last, here came Ben Priest. With his graying crew cut he looked every inch the military man. He was carrying a fat cardboard folder with a blue NASA logo stenciled on the front. He was moving at a half-trot, despite the heat, but he showed no signs of sweat; his crisp short-sleeved shirt glowed white in the brilliant noon light.

This time he hadn’t been able to get her into the lab itself. Nobody was supposed to see the stuff the Soviets were sending back from Mars.

Ben clambered into the car beside her. ‘Got it.’

She reached over. ‘Give.’

‘Hell, no. Is that any way to greet an old friend? Let’s get out of this heat first. Mars can wait a few more minutes.’

She suppressed her eagerness. Be polite, Natalie. And, after all, this was Ben. She started the car. ‘Let’s find a bar. Do you know anywhere?’

‘Only the waterholes where the JPL hairies hang out, and I’d rather take a break from them.’

‘I’m staying at the Holiday Inn. It’s only a few minutes from here.’

‘Go for it.’

She pulled out.

‘I was expecting to see Mike too,’ Ben said.

‘Oh, in the end he couldn’t get away. He has his head shoved much too firmly up a NERVA 2 exhaust pipe.’ Or up his own ass, maybe, she thought sourly.

‘You know the NERVA thing still isn’t going too well. My flight on Apollo-N has been delayed again, and –’

‘Mike doesn’t tell me anything. Half of it’s classified, anyhow.’

‘Well, that’s the word in the Astronaut Office. So how’s life for my favorite girl-geologist?’

She grunted, and pushed her slippery sunglasses back up her nose. ‘Shitty, if you want the truth. My professor at Berkeley – Cattermole – is a jackass.’

Priest laughed out loud. ‘I wish you’d say what you mean.’

‘Cattermole’s smart at departmental infighting, and putting together grant applications. But that’s it. The rest of his head shut down long ago. His projects are lousy, as are his methods. He sees Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab as just a way to chisel money out of NASA. If I was smart enough to have seen that before I signed up, I wouldn’t have gone within ten miles of the man.’

‘But your contract is only short-term.’

‘Yeah, and then I have to find another.’

‘Which you will. If you want it. You’re a bright girl, Natalie.’

‘Don’t patronize me, asshole.’

He laughed again.

‘Yes, I’ll find another job. Maybe I’ll even get an assistant professorship somewhere. But …’

‘But you don’t think life as a rock hound is going to work out for you.’

‘I don’t know, Ben. Maybe not.’ Not even working on Mars data was satisfying her.

‘So what’s your alternative?’

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