Voyage

Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 001/13:45:57

‘You are go for TOI,’ capcom Bob Crippen said. ‘One minute thirty.’

‘Thank you,’ Gershon replied.

York pulled on her helmet and locked it to the neck of her pressure suit. She fumbled slightly, her fingers clumsy inside her stiff gloves. She buckled her canvas restraints around her.

Once more she felt cool, stale air wash over her face.

Ares, assembled, was a slim, fragile pencil of metal. It was a big, bright object, and it would be easily visible from Earth, as a naked-eye star passing over Cape Canaveral.

Stone said, ‘Go for ET H-two pressurization.’

‘Confirm.’

York began closing switches that would raise the temperature inside the booster’s two great External Tanks. Liquid hydrogen would boil and evaporate, and the resulting gas would force liquid propellant through the feed pipes and into the combustion chambers of the MS-II.

York was a geologist, and that was why she was going to Mars. But a crew was only three people. So, if you expected to fly in space, you had to expect to study up on a lot of mundane crap that was necessary just to keep the spacecraft and booster working.

And Natalie York’s specialty was the External Tanks.

She knew enough to give expert papers on External Tanks to the industry. In fact, she had given a paper on them, God help her.

‘One minute,’ Gershon said.

York glanced at the window to her right. She was over the west Atlantic, and it was early morning down there; she could see boats on the Gulf, ribbons of land laid out like a cartoon map.

TOI was Transfer Orbit Injection: it meant departure from Earth orbit, the start of the long transit to Mars. This was a key moment in the mission – in her life, in fact.

But a day and a half here, orbiting Earth, wasn’t enough.

She had tried to fix some of the more memorable scenes of Earth in her head. Night over Africa: the fires of nomad encampments, spread across the desert. Thunderstorms over New Zealand: lightning like flashbulbs, exploding under cottony layers of cloud, discharges sparking each other in great chain reactions covering the country.

November 6, 1986. That was the day when Ares was due to return to Earth orbit. Mission day five hundred and ninety-five. Then I’ll be back; I’ll be seeing you again. A bright Sunday morning, with my crates full of bits of Mars.

‘Ares, you are go for the burn,’ Crippen said.

Stone set the ‘master arm’ switch to ON, and York could see him checking over the rest of the instrument panel. Guidance control was set to primary; thrust control was on automatic; the craft was in the correct attitude; the engine gimbals were enabled, so that the nozzles could swivel, like eyeballs in their sockets, to direct the craft.

Eight seconds before ignition, York felt a push at her back. Ullage: small rockets firing around the base of the stack, settling the propellants before the main burn.

‘99:40,’ the commit code, started flashing up on the small computer screen before Stone. Are you sure you want to do this?

There was a small button marked PROCEED under the screen. Stone reached out a gloved finger, and pressed the button.

Gershon counted down: ‘Five. Four …’

York braced herself.

There was a distant rumble, carried through the stack, as the MS-II’s four huge engines ignited, three hundred feet away from her. The acceleration was low, almost gentle, pushing her into her couch with a soft pressure across her chest and limbs.

After thirty-seven hours of microgravity, she felt enormously heavy. But at least it was smooth: this time, the ride really did feel like the simulator. Later in the mission – when Ares had burned off its fuel, reducing its mass – the acceleration of the MS-II would be a lot tougher.

Gershon read out velocity increments. York could hear how his voice was masked, slightly, by the gum he chewed. Juicy Fruit. How can you eat gum in a spacesuit? Gershon wasn’t above sticking a wad to the inside of his faceplate, with his tongue, for retrieval later. The guy was gross.

‘Ares, Houston, you’re looking good here,’ Crippen said. ‘Right down the old center line.’

‘Thank you,’ Stone said. ‘Things look fine up here too. Rates looking good.’

She looked out her window. The Earth was falling away, visibly; it was a remarkable sight, as if the Earth was a special-effects prop, being hauled away from her window.

The sense of motion, of speed, was remarkable.

‘How’s it going, York?’ Stone asked dryly.

She started. He’d caught her rubber-necking again. ‘Fine. Fine, Phil.’

She turned back to her station. She had her job to do, and she should get to it. It won’t fail because of me. The mantra of everyone involved with the Ares program.

She stole a glance at Stone. He was watching his own readouts, eyes fixed on the goal, apparently oblivious to her again. Stone was in utter control of himself. He always was.

She began to watch the status of the External Tanks in earnest, their brief biographies spelled out by the displays in front of her.

Floods of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, sixty-four thousand gallons a minute, pumped out of the Tanks to be consumed in the engines of the MS-II. Already the pressure in the Tanks was dropping away, she read; to keep the pressure up, there was a complicated backfeed system which took vaporized gases back from the engines into the Tanks. The fuel system was surprisingly complicated, elaborate, a system of huge pipes, fountains of supercold liquid propellants cascading into combustion chambers as hot as the sun …

In the middle of the burn, Crippen said, ‘Okay, Ares, Houston, we’d like to try for the TV request.’

Stone and Gershon both stifled groans. York glanced up self-consciously, at the little Westinghouse TV camera fixed to its bracket above her head.

Crippen said, ‘We would like five minutes’ worth of TV, and we would like an exterior shot, with a narrative if you can give us one.’

‘Copy,’ Stone said.

NASA was following a policy of televising the most dramatic moments of the mission. It was all to drum up interest and enthusiasm for Ares, to allow the great American public to see what they were paying for. A feed from the Command Module to the TV companies had been provided during the launch itself, for example. But York wasn’t so sure that had been a good idea. The launch probably looked too damn comfortable, to a generation that had been brought up on the glamorous pyrotechnics of Star Wars.

Stone nodded to York, and she pushed a button on her console to start the camera.

‘Okay,’ said Stone. ‘Welcome to Ares. You’re looking at us in our Command Module here. We’re in the middle of our TOI maneuver. We see through our windows the sun going by, and, of course, the Earth. We can give you the time of day in our system of mission elapsed time: thirty-seven hours, and fifty-one minutes, and umpteen seconds. Now maybe Ralph can show you the view.’

Stone nodded to York. She reached up to pull the TV camera off its mount. Because of the thrust she couldn’t just float it; she had to pass the camera to Gershon. It felt massy, awkward, in the gentle acceleration of the MS-II.

‘Okay, Houston, here you go,’ Gershon said. ‘Here you see the Earth, falling away beneath us.’

‘Copy, Ares. Fine images.’

‘It really is a fantastic sight,’ Gershon said. ‘We’re somewhere over the Atlantic right now, and I can see the eastern seaboard, from Florida all the way up to Newfoundland, as clear as crystal. I don’t know if that’s visible in your images.’

‘We see it.’

‘And as I look to my right, I can see, just toward the limb of the planet, what must be Western Europe and Africa. I can see Spain, and the British Isles, all kind of foreshortened. The British Isles are definitely a greener color than the brownish-green that we have in Spain. There’s a little haze over Spain, and what looks like cumulus clouds piled up over the south of England.’

‘Copy. That matches the weather reports we have today.’

‘Good to know I’m looking at the right planet, Houston …’

Stone said now, ‘I got a comment about the point on the Earth where the sun’s rays reflect back toward us. In general the color of the ocean is uniform, a rich blue, except for that region – a circle, maybe an eighth of the Earth’s radius. In this circular area, the blue of the water turns to a grayish color and I’m sure that’s where the sun’s rays are being reflected back on up toward us.’

‘Roger, Phil,’ Crippen said. ‘That’s been observed before. It’s similar to a light shining on a bowling ball. You get this bright spot and the blue of the water then turns into a grayish color.’

‘A bowling ball, yeah. Or maybe the top of Phil’s head.’ Gershon laughed at his own joke.

It was true, York saw, twisting her head; there was a huge highlight on the blue surface of the ocean. Damn. The thing really is a sphere. Like a ball of steel.

‘Thank you, Ares. How about an internal position now, please? Maybe you’d like to talk us through what the TOI is all about, today.’

Gershon passed the camera back along the cabin, and York fitted it to its pedestal, so it had a panoramic view of the three of them. She caught Stone’s face; he rolled his eyes, and pointed to her, and to the camera.

York was on.

She turned back to her displays, and tried not to look up too often at the camera. Her throat felt tight, her face flushed inside her helmet; suddenly she could feel every hot crumple of her pressure suit. She keyed the press-to-talk switch on her headset cable. ‘Okay, Houston. This is our TOI maneuver: TOI, for Transfer Orbit Injection. Right now, the big engines on our main booster stage, the MS-II, are firing to push us out of Earth orbit. The MS-II is just a version of the second stage of the old Saturn V, modified to serve as an orbital injection vehicle. The S-IIs which took Apollo to the Moon had five J-2 engines. Well, we’ve got just four engines, upgrades called J-2S; the central one was removed to accommodate a lox tanker docking port. The MS-II has got more insulation, to stop boiloff, and its own small maneuvering engines, and more docking ports at the front.

‘I guess you can say we’re all pretty much relieved that the MS-II is working as well as it is; we’re going to rely on the MS-II not just to leave Earth but to slow us when we get to Mars, and to bring us out of Martian orbit when we’re ready to come home …’

She dried up. She was speaking too fast, waffling. ‘Stand by,’ capcom Crippen said. ‘Okay, we’ve cut the live feed. Ares, you’ve got a pretty big audience: it was live in the US, it went live to Japan, Western Europe and much of South America. Everybody reports good color, they appreciate the great show.’

Gershon said, ‘Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.’

‘Missing you already,’ said Crippen.

Christ, what rubbish. No wonder they cut the feed.

She hadn’t meant to say any of that; she’d wanted to say something personal.

To say how it felt, to see the Earth fall away.

She’d always criticized earlier generations of astronauts, for their lack of eloquence. Maybe it wasn’t so easy, after all.

‘ETs depleted,’ York reported. ‘Ready for sep.’

‘Roger,’ Stone said.

More than two million pounds of fuel, a treasure that had taken five years to haul up to Earth orbit, had burned off in sixteen minutes.

‘Three, two, one. Fire.’

Right now, pyrotechnics would be severing the securing bolts and frames at top and bottom of each Tank, and guillotines should be slicing across the wide feed pipes which had carried fuel from the Tanks into the MS-II’s belly. York half-expected to hear a rattle of bolts, muffled clangs, like the staging during the Saturn VB launch; but she heard and felt nothing.

‘ET sep is good,’ she said.

‘Confirm ET sep,’ said Crippen.

‘Hey, how about that.’ Gershon was looking out his window. ‘I can see a Tank.’

York twisted in her couch, and turned to look. Silhouetted against the gray-blue of Earth, the discarded ET was a fat, cone-tipped cigar case, colored muddy brown and silver. On its flank she could see bits of lettering, and small patches of orange insulation amidst the silver. Propellant dribbled from one of the severed feed pipes, a stream of crystals which glittered against the skin of Earth. The dribble made it look as if the ET had been wounded, like a great harpooned whale.

The Tank rapidly receded from Ares, falling away and tumbling slowly.

Both Tanks were moving quickly enough to have escaped Earth’s gravity field, with Ares. The Tanks would become independent satellites of the sun, lasting maybe for billions of years before falling into a planet’s gravity well.

She waved the Tank good-bye, with a little flourish of her gloved fingers. Good luck, baby.

The engines finally died. She felt it as an easing away of acceleration; a gentle reduction of the subliminal noise and vibration from the remote engines.

‘That’s it,’ Stone said. ‘Shutdown. Everything looks nominal.’

Crippen called up: ‘You got a whole room of people down here who say you are looking good, Ares.’

Gershon whooped in reply. ‘It was one hell of a ride, Bob.’

Stone said dryly, ‘From up here the burn was copacetic, Houston. Thank you.’ He began to uncouple his helmet and gloves.

York watched the receding Earth fold over on itself, becoming a tight, compact ball in space, with the Atlantic Ocean thrust outwards toward her, wrinkled, glistening.

The Ares cluster was only a couple of hundred miles further from the Earth than in its low orbit. But now, it was traveling so fast that Earth’s gravity could no longer hold it. Four hundred miles a minute, York thought: so fast that she would cross the orbit of the Moon in just twelve hours.

Crippen said, ‘Is that music I hear in the background?’

‘No,’ Stone said. ‘Ralph is singing.’

Saturday, August 7, 1971 Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston

Bert Seger had some paperwork to finish up before he got to go home today. But when news of the splashdown came in he walked out of his office, into the Control Center’s high corridor. He pulled a cigar out of the breast pocket of his jacket, his hand brushing the pink carnation that his wife had placed there for him, as always.

After a twelve-day flight, Apollo 14 had splashed down in the Pacific, four miles from the carrier Okinawa. NASA was going to be on a high for a while, Seger realized. Scott and Irwin had spent nineteen hours outside the LM, compared to under three hours for Armstrong and Muldoon, and they had traversed seventeen miles around the terrain at the base of a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain. The flight controllers and astronauts had become pretty good at coordinating with the scientists in the back rooms about where and how they should proceed. Almost every one of the J-class mission’s innovations – the upgraded LM, the Rover, the orbiting Service Module’s instrument pallet – had worked without a hitch.

14 had been the biggest success since the first landing: even skeptics among the scientists were applauding the mission.

But now it was done.

Seger’s footsteps echoed in the quiet. It was just two years since Apollo 11, he thought, and yet the first age of lunar exploration was already over. Damn it, Seger thought. We just got good at this stuff, and now we have to stop.

He stopped at the door of the MOCR, Mission Control, and stepped in. The MOCR was deserted; everybody had already left for the splashdown party, some almighty gumbo affair the Mission Evaluation guys were holding over in Building 45.

He climbed the steps to the Flight Director’s console: the heart of a mission, even more so than the couch of the spacecraft commander himself. The big twenty-by-ten-feet screen at the front of the room was black, cold. The controllers’ consoles were littered with books, logs, checklists, headsets, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and half-smoked cigars. Some of the controllers had left behind the little Stars and Stripes they’d waved when the spacecraft splashed down.

Maybe, he thought, some day these consoles would be full of data streaming in from a manned spacecraft in orbit around Mars.

Standing here, thinking of it in those terms, it didn’t seem possible; but then, the lunar landing must have seemed just as impossible back in 1959, when NASA didn’t yet exist, and technicians had taken Mercury boiler-plate capsules to the Cape on the backs of flatbed trucks, cushioned by mattresses.

It was Bert Seger’s job to make Mars happen.

Seger had been appointed, just a month ago, as a deputy director of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, one of NASA’s four big divisions. His job was running the embryonic Mars Program Office, here in Houston.

Fred Michaels had become the new Administrator, after Tom Paine’s resignation, and he seemed determined to pull the Agency out of the mess his predecessor had left behind. And he had appointed Bert Seger himself.

‘Bert, the damn Mars thing is already coming apart at the seams, and we haven’t even got back the final Phase A definition reports yet. Look – I need someone to do for Mars what Joe Shea did for the Moon program, back in the early days. To pull the thing together. Or we’re never going to get it past Nixon.’

Seger understood. ‘You need a foreman,’ he’d said. ‘And an enforcer.’

‘Damn right I do. Will you do it?’

‘Damn right I will.’

‘Then here’s your first job,’ Michaels had said. ‘Sort out the goddamn mission mode …’

The competing industry contractors, preparing their Phase A preliminary studies, were all working on different ways of getting to Mars, but the routes they were planning were all direct: Earth to Mars, and back to Earth. Now there was some guy in Langley who was kicking up a fuss about another mode. Something to do with flying by Venus on the way.

‘Some little jerk called Dana,’ Michaels said. ‘Gregory Dana. He wrote direct to me. Can you believe it?’ Dana had bypassed all the bureaucratic channels, and had got right up a lot of asses.

‘Is he right? About Venus?’

‘How in hell do I know? Could I care less, at this point? This Dana has got them all – the Marshall guys, the rest of Langley, the contractors, the Budget Office, the damn Science Advisory Council – buzzing like wasps in a jar. The Requests for Proposal for Phase B detailed definition studies are about to go out. This Dana is putting all of that under threat. Bert, I want you to sort it out for me …’

Seger didn’t doubt his own ability to resolve this mode issue. Nor did he doubt that he’d be able to fulfill his greater commission: to pull together the Mars program. If that was what the country decided it wanted to do.

Seger always prayed, intensely, for a few minutes at the start of the working day, or before tackling a major task. He felt that showed his character had deep roots, strength, conviction. Standing there in the MOCR, he offered up a brief prayer now.

He thought of that fragile little world two hundred and forty thousand miles away, where three LM descent stages still sat, surrounded by footprints and scuffed-up lunar soil. But the footprints, and the flags, even the science – none of that was really the point, as far as Seger was concerned. Not even getting there ahead of the Russians. To his mind, what Apollo had proved was that men could indeed travel to places beyond the Earth, and live and work there.

The Moon hadn’t been as exotic as some had suspected. Some had predicted that the astronauts would sink into miles of dust. Or that the mountains of the Moon might be fragile, like huge gray meringues maybe, and would collapse in puffs of dust when the astronauts tried to walk there. Or maybe the moondust would catch fire, or explode, when the astronauts brought it into the LM. Or the astronauts would be afflicted by terrible diseases …

In the end, those hard-headed engineers who had stubbornly insisted that the Moon would be just like Arizona – and had designed the LM’s landing gear that way – had turned out to be right. That’s what I gotta bear in mind, he thought. Mars will be just like Arizona, too.

To Seger, that was a magical thought, as if Earth and Moon and Mars were somehow unified, physically, as they were bridged by the exploits of Americans.

He walked carefully down the steps, away from the Flight Director’s console, and latched the door behind him.

Monday, August 16, 1971 George C. Marshall Space Center, Huntsville, Alabama

Gregory Dana arrived late, his Vu-graph foils and reports bundled under his arm; by the time he reached the conference room – right next to the office of von Braun himself – it was already full, and he had to creep to the back to find a space.

The room was on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building, colloquially known as the von Braun Hilton. Just about everybody who counted seemed to be here: senior staff from Marshall and Houston, a few managers from NASA Headquarters in Washington, and a lot of people from the contractors whose studies were being presented today.

At the front of the room, so remote from Dana that it was difficult to see his face, Bert Seger, head of the nascent Mars Program Office, was making his opening remarks.

They were all here to listen to the final presentations of the Mars mission mode Phase A studies. Their purpose today, Seger said, was to settle on a recommended mode for the development program. This group had to regard itself as in competition for resources and endorsement with the parallel studies going on into the reusable Space Shuttle; a similar heavyweight meeting had recently been held in Williamsburg to thrash out some of the conceptual issues involved in that program.