Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds

January was the start of a promising year for space buffs. My wife and I flew up to Pasadena, midmonth, to “be there” at Jet Propulsion Laboratories when Mariner flew by Uranus. There was a little disappointment at the planet’s nearly total blankness, but exciting returns from the rings and satellites.

It wasn’t as mind-boggling as the Jupiter and Saturn flybys had been, but well worth the trip. We watched the pictures come in, shmoozed with the other space types, picked up all the NASA goodies. Killed a couple of days doing what writers do in Hollywood, and got back to Florida in time for the shuttle launch.

We’d moved to Florida to be near Cape Kennedy, back in the Apollo days, and I covered the moon launches, Skylab, Apollo/ Soyuz, and the shuttle for a variety of magazines and newspapers. The journalism didn’t pay as well as the usual business, fiction and drama, but reporters can get press passes and watch from the firing line, the press area: 3.5 miles from the pad, just outside the hairy edge of the radius of destruction.

We were always a little nervous about that, and made obvious morbid jokes about it. After all, if the reporters were slightly inside the radius of destruction, nobody could file any negative stories after a disaster. The papers would be full of reporters’ obits; no room for investigative journalism. And who would be left to investigate?

Maybe it was less of a joke for me. I’d been a demolition engineer in Vietnam, and one day in 1968 spent an instant quite inside a small radius of destruction, and followed it with five months in a hospital. I knew how loud and hard those things could be, explosions, and how slowly flesh and bone grow back. Any good-sized spaceship is sitting on top of a tactical nuke’s worth of high explosive. Was 3.5 miles really far enough? There wasn’t even a hole to jump into or anything to hide behind; just a lowest-bidder windbreak of flimsy sheet metal and lumber. So I was always a little bit ready to die when the countdown numbers got small, despite NASA’s assurances and my own suspicion that it would be more dangerous to ride the IRT or eat fast food.

After the first few shuttle launches we stopped going through the hassle of getting press passes. We could drive a mile to the beach and watch the things go up. It wasn’t quite as exciting, fifty miles outside of the radius of destruction, but it was still being there.

So we bundled up against the unusual January chill and drove out onto Daytona’s hard smooth beach, to join the horde of shivering tourists. It seemed to go without a hitch, one short hold and then blastoff. My wife took a dust-jacket picture of me with the rocket going up in the background, and then I returned to the car, so I could steady the heavy binoculars against the door. I focused on the shuttle and watched it explode.

It was surreal. I said “Oh shit,” or something equally profound, and my wife burst into tears, but the inexperienced people around us were cheering and chattering excitedly, thinking they had just witnessed booster separation. Most of a minute went by before they realized what had happened. We stood in the cold and watched the pieces fall and the smoke drift and then, like everybody, went home to live the canned reality of it over and over.

Not quite “like everybody,” of course, but not just because of writing a few articles and books. In some parallel, or slightly divergent, universe, I could have been one of the seven who died. I tried to get a ticket three different ways.

Back in the sixties, NASA had a “Scientist as Astronaut” program. Anyone with a Ph.D. in a physical science or engineering could apply; they would train you as a pilot and put you in the Apollo program. I got my bachelor’s in astronomy and was accepted to graduate school in physics, aiming for the program. In between, though, I got drafted and went to Vietnam, where I suffered the above-mentioned explosion and hospitalization. I came back nominally disabled and deeply rattled—not the kind of person you want to put in charge of a gliding brick.

So I sat around writing books while the Apollo program went its way and NASA pasted together the shuttle. They sent out a call for Mission Specialists, and I was surprised to find that I could meet the preliminary requirements. But when I got the application, the damned explosion came back to haunt me again. The only physical requirement was in hearing; I’d returned from Vietnam with big blocks of frequencies permanently missing or masked by roaring and whistling tinnitus.

Then a third chance presented itself. When Carter was President they talked about sending up a writer. They weren’t sure whether it would be a novelist, journalist, or poet—but y’all write, hear? Hell, I’d done all those things—I’ve won awards in all those things. I put in two applications, one solo and one as half of a writer/artist team with friend Rick Sternbach.

Of course no administration is bound by the promises of its predecessors. Besides, if you send up a poet or a novelist, he’s liable to write any damned thing. So Reagan’s people decided on a journalist, probably a television journalist, definitely one with a tame track record. But first let’s send a couple of politicians, yeah, and then how about a teacher? We make the teachers happy, we can jack them around another four years. Maybe they won’t notice the Department of Education has gone desaparecido.

I suppose it is still possible for a left-leaning Vietnam vet writer to get a ticket on the shuttle. Maybe a special flight, along with labor leaders, former budget directors, and senators from Massachusetts. You can put a lot of extra people in there with the weight you save by taking out the landing gear.

Reflex sour grapes aside, brave talk aside, I have to wonder whether I really would say yes if they asked me now. A couple of hours after the Challenger exploded, I was interviewed by a local reporter who knew I had tried to get aboard, and she asked the obvious, and I gave the obvious answer: sure, I’d go on the next flight out. They’ll analyze what went wrong this time and fix it, and fix a few other things, and it’ll be safer than ever. One in 25 is long odds anyhow, I told her; like cutting a deck of cards and hoping not to come up with a red ace.

But there are still two red aces in the deck. All of us who watched those seven die must have spent some time trying to imagine what it was like. It would be good if they’d had no idea; here one microsecond and gone the next. But probably the three who had flown the shuttle before had time to hear or feel that something was wrong. We know that Smith, the pilot, did; eight seconds before the explosion, he started trying to compensate for the craft’s wobbling. And there is still the horrible possibility that some or all of them survived the blast, and lived long enough to know that they were falling to their deaths. The mind glances away from this kind of extremity, this nightmare that has long been a part of most people’s repertoire, at least people who fly. There can’t be many truly good ways to spend your last moments on earth, but watching the ground or sea rush up to kill you has to be near the bottom of anybody’s list.

So that’s also in the “Would you go?” equation now, along with a few other things that weren’t there before January 22nd. Like finding out that NASA’s bureaucracy has as much Right Stuff as the Post Office. Like seeing Reagan, who late in life has developed a macabre sense of humor, appoint as head of NASA James Fletcher, who originally okayed the design compromises and presided over the creative budgeting that made the shuttle what it was. Sort of like giving the guy who designed Chernobyl the Order of Lenin, and the assignment to rebuild it.

The newspapers I read have soft-pedaled the political background of the disaster. I guess it’s partly Reagan’s inexplicable voodoo and partly NASA’s residual Teflon. Yards of copy about O-rings and launch temperature, but not much about how the shuttle started out as the Rolls-Royce of outer space and wound up being the Ford Pinto. Let’s take a look at it.

First, consider location. When the Challenger blew up, the people in control of it couldn’t see what was happening—because they were in Texas. The Manned Space Flight Center in Houston takes over control of every manned mission as soon as it clears the tower. That doesn’t make much sense in terms of engineering or even plain logic. It made a lot of sense to George Brown, though. This is how things work:

Brown & Root, Inc., as in George Brown & Root, was in 1961 the largest construction firm in Texas. We had a Texan Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, and a Texan Congressman, Albert Thomas, who was chairman of the House Independent Offices Appropriations Subcommittee. He was the guy who approved NASA’s budget. Johnson was head of the powerful National Aeronautics and Space Council.

James Webb, NASA’s first director, had only nine years to put a man on the Moon, and these two Texans were digging in their heels over his budget. He soon found out how to win them over. George Brown, who was also president of the governors of Rice University in Houston, would dearly love to have a major research facility located at Rice. How about the Manned Space Flight Center?

The deed was done, and Johnson was able to brag, “Rice University is going to be a major scientific center, along with MIT in the East and Caltech on the Coast.” Most of the design and construction contracts, of course, went to Brown & Root.¹

For the record, it was more geography than politics that caused Florida to be the site of America’s spaceport. If you launch from earth eastward, you get about a thousand-mile-per-hour boost from the Earth’s rotation. That boost increases, the closer you are to the equator. And of course you want a lot of empty ocean to the east, in case you drop something. There’s only one better location in the hemisphere, paranoia buffs: Nicaragua.

It’s a nice irony that there’s a plaque on the Moon with Richard Nixon’s name on it. Nixon reportedly was hostile to the Apollo Project, seeing it as a memorial to the despised John Kennedy, and he certainly did everything in his power to scuttle the American space effort once we did get on the Moon and off again. The deficiencies of the shuttle are largely the result of Nixonian parsimony.

His Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was chairman of a Space Task Group, which in 1969 came up with three options for future space exploration. The most expensive, projected at $10 billion per year, called for the space shuttle, a 50-man space station, an orbiting lunar station, and a manned mission to Mars in the mid-1980’s. The next was an Apollo-style push to put men on Mars by 1986, which would have cost about $8 billion per year. The cheapest recommendation was to develop only the space station and space shuttle, at $4–$5.7 billion per year. (In 1968, the year before the first moon landing, NASA spent $4.6 billion, which incidentally come to about a tenth of what the Department of Defense was soaking up.)

Nixon predictably chose the cheapest option, and then whittled it further down by holding off on the space station until after we’d seen whether the shuttle worked. Then NASA and the White House haggled some more over the price and design, winding up with a craft that would do less but cost half as much. (The Department of Defense stepped in during the process, threatening to withhold support unless they redesigned the cargo bay to accommodate a mysterious something this wide by that long.) Fletcher said he could deliver the craft by 1977, at a cost of $5 billion. It wound up being 1981 and $15.5 billion.

The design turned out to be lethal. If some engineer had initially proposed, back in the sixties, that we bolt a tiny spaceship to a big throw-away fuel tank and strap two solid-fuel rockets on the side to get it up to speed, they would have handed him his hat. Human beings riding solid-fuel rockets? How do they turn them off if something goes wrong? At least one Apollo astronaut looked at the machine and said he wouldn’t go up in it.

The most promising early design, the “F-l Flyback,” used as a booster one large liquid-fuel rocket with a human pilot. It would take the shuttle up above most of the atmosphere, release it, and fly back to the landing field at Kennedy. That shuttle would have carried more and gone higher. But the design was projected to have cost $10–$13 billion; Congress and the OMB rejected it. (To be fair, it seems likely that the Flyback would have suffered about the same “cost growth” and “schedule slippage” as the system we wound up with, since it also involved fundamentally new, untested components.)

It looks as if the Soviets are developing a liquid-fuel flyback shuttle. The European Space Agency, undeterred by Challenger, is going with a smaller version of the American design.

So what is America going to choose? Reagan promised a replacement shuttle, but that’s meaningless. Would it even be a good idea? Space scientists say no; the shuttle has been a disaster for them since the first blueprint, bleeding money away from science and bequeathing it to the manned space effort, which is emotionally satisfying (at least to the people who supply the money), but intellectually rather repetitive and sterile. The scientists would much prefer a reliable unmanned fleet with lots of payload opportunities.

The man-in-space supporters might also prefer that a replacement shuttle not be built. After all, it’s ten-year-old technology, about as sexy as a 1976 car. It never has done what it was supposed to do: deliver payloads to low Earth orbit regularly and cheaply, providing a continuous American presence in space. They could argue that the billions would be better spent developing the next generation of orbiters, either the elegant scramjets or the utilitarian Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles (HLLV).

A scramjet is the sort of aircraft/spacecraft that Reagan referred to as the “Orient Express” in his post-Challenger speeches. He was pitching it toward his wealthy friends, who want to close a deal in Tokyo before lunch and be back in time for Dallas, but it does have more general utility. The main thing is that it can take off horizontally, from a conventional airport, and return to any other large airport after delivering a payload into low Earth orbit. The Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle, by contrast, is a brute-force unmanned ferry that carries factory-sized loads into orbit. Most designs just call for scaling up current booster rockets, though some are more exotic, using lasers or nuclear fuel—not too likely in the current intellectual climate.

It doesn’t take too much savvy to predict that whichever course the Department of Defense thinks best will be the one that we pursue, at least until Reagan is flushed from the system. That would probably be the conservative course of replacing Challenger and, for their Star Wars eventuality, stepping up research on the HLLV. Or maybe someone will point out that the scramjet is the highest fastest bomber ever.

I’d like to see all three alternatives developed to some level of investment. Replace the Challenger, and in the course of building the new one, learn how to make the other three craft—with which we are definitely stuck—safer and more reliable. Build some unmanned one-shot launchers to put NASA back into its original business, the exploration of space. Develop the scramjet and HLLV so that America doesn’t become the left-behind Portugal of the Space Age.

It’s four in the morning and I just came in from looking at Mars, which through the telescope presents a shimmering pale orange disk with elusive gray-green markings and the white gleam of a polar ice cap. Observing it gives me a bad case of déjà vu and what-might-have-been.

The orbit of Mars is rather elliptical; its distance from the Earth can vary by a factor of almost seven. It comes closest, about 35 million miles, only once each fifteen years or so, an event that astronomers call “most favorable opposition.”

Two such oppositions ago, in 1956, I was a boy with his first telescope, and the vaguely round orange blob that it revealed was full of mystery, and not only for me. Nowadays, with modern optics and computerized image enhancement, you could make a fairly accurate map of Mars from here. Back then, scientists only agreed on a few obvious markings, and couldn’t say for sure whether they were vegetation or simply darker ground. (A few oppositions before that, the majority view was that the dark areas were oceans, but by 1956 we knew Mars was arid.)

Putting the telescope away, I was suddenly struck with the realization that there could have been men and women up there. For some reason I hadn’t made the connection, emotionally: this closest approach of the planet was the one we would have been aiming for in the post-Apollo Mars program. If only Nixon had been in favor of it—or if in his cynicism he had used it as a smoke screen for Vietnam and Watergate—what a different future we might be living in now.

Or would it be? After the first couple of moon shots, Americans were pretty blasé; NBC was showered with complaints when it dared interrupt the Super Bowl to show two clowns walking around on the Moon. A lot of Americans would probably think a Mars expedition a colossal waste, and some of them, even an outright fake, since Industrial Light & Magic can do a better Mars than the real one without leaving northern California. And do you believe everything the government tells you?

More serious people will argue that it’s irresponsible to spend money and energy on a space stunt when, for instance, there are tens of thousands of children starving in this country, and millions in Africa; when all the topsoil is going south and the sky is leaking acid rain and thousands of species are endangered and the ozone layer’s disappearing…name your poison. It’s true that if we took the $10 billion price tag of a Mars expedition and applied it to humanitarian ends, we could do a lot of good, at least temporarily. But you can argue that greater benefit might ultimately result from spending the money on Mars. Not just from technological spin-offs, which are hard to predict, but from the trip itself.

The rationale for large space projects usually masquerades as logical argument, but it’s actually a matter of faith, or belief, dressed up with some currently hot concern. Kennedy could sell the Moon by exploiting paranoia about Russian technology, growing since Sputnik, with a nice subtext of concern over American education. Gerard K. O’Neill did a convincing sales job for solar power satellites by invoking the specter of finite petroleum reserves during the Energy Crisis.² So what is hot now?

We could go back a quarter of a century and recycle Kennedy’s rhetorical fuel. The Challenger and Titan failures put Russia five to ten years ahead of us in the practical—read “military”—use of space, so paranoia in that direction is even more justifiable than it was after Sputnik. His failure-of-American-science-education subtext is at least as valid now, as well. A recent poll characterized 85% of adult Americans as “technologically illiterate”; only a third of them could identify what a molecule was.

But the paranoia road leads straight to Star Wars. The rightwing politicians and militarists will have SDI if we let them—at least they’ll have the parts that work—but it’s not, except for the obvious technological links, actually related to space exploration. Where Star Wars would be a stupefyingly expensive monument to fear, a Mars expedition could be the focus of unprecedented international cooperation, and not cost us all that much. We can and should spread the expense and the glory as thin and wide as possible.

Besides us and the Soviets and the European Space Agency (which coordinates the space programs of ten member nations), Japan, India, and China have launched space ships. Other countries, such as Canada and Indonesia, don’t have direct launch capabilities, but do have space programs using others’ launch vehicles. Let’s offer all of them a piece of another world.

This world seems more fragmented now than it has been since World War II—differences leading to squabbles, squabbles growing to wars; wars perpetuated out of stubborn bloodymindedness. We desperately need goals to pursue as a world, and a Martian expedition would work better than most earthbound projects, at least in that Mars isn’t part of anybody’s turf, yet.

There’s a particular direction of wishful thinking in science fiction, a story plot whose variations crop up so often that it almost qualifies as a subgenre: a scientific project of huge scope serves to remind us how small we are alone and how powerful we can be if we work together, the whole world. A sensitive modern treatment of the story is James Gunn’s novel The Listeners, where radio astronomers “hear” a transmission from an apparently mature race many light years away, and work out a response, and the world surprises itself by waiting with calm patience for the next century to bring a reply.

My favorite, though, is Howard Fast’s clever 1959 story “The Martian Shop.” In this tale a number of shops spring up all over the world, overnight, supposedly manned by Martians. They sell only a few items, but there’s nothing like them on Earth: a perpetual light bulb, a razor blade that never needs sharpening, a motor with no obvious source of power. They sell a few of these things and then disappear. Delight at the gadgets soon turns to paranoia—what kind of weapons could these bozos build? The only thing for it, of course, is a worldwide crash program to send a fleet to Mars.

When they get there, though, they won’t find any shops or Martians. The whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by an international committee of scientists, whose goal it was to deflect the nationalistic energies that were going into stockpiling nuclear weapons, preparing for the last war. I don’t remember whether the story tells what happens after they finally do get to Mars, though we can hope that humanity takes the joke well and sees itself in a new way, as the scientists intended.

Alas, we know there aren’t any magic-wand solutions to real problems. Instead of a cabal of benevolent father figures bent on saving us from ourselves, we have NASA, hard pressed to save itself from itself. But the moral of that tongue-in-cheek story is still useful, still true, in our Martian contest.

The world needs a common goal that can survive changes in parliaments, presidents, premiers. A Mars expedition might benefit from being done slowly, the expense spread out over time as well as being shared by many countries. Soviet boosters, say, lifting a ship with American life support systems, European instrumentation using Japanese electronics and Canadian robotics. A crew from all around the world, taking the longest trip in history, and doing it in the name of their common humanity.

The goal of putting humans onto another planet for the first time is intoxicating. But as often happens, it could be that this time the trip is more important than the destination.

¹ It wasn’t just a matter of Webb saying okay, and tossing the $60 million contract Texasward. A team of NASA experts went around the country ostensibly searching for the best site location, and wound up recommending Houston. But Florida Trend magazine, investigating how their state lost the Center, unearthed a memo from Webb to Johnson, admitting that Houston was the only politically realistic choice—three months before the team started its search. The rest was for appearances.

² O’Neill’s basic social argument, though, is still a convincing one for me: there will be no lasting peace until there’s a measure of permanent prosperity in the Third World; the Earth doesn’t have readily accessible energy and material resources sufficient to raise the standard of living of poor nations while maintaining the rest of us in comfort; ergo, the energy and materials must come from somewhere else; from space.

Appendix A

Putting the Fox in Charge of the Henhouse

Even in an administration notable for spectacularly inappropriate appointments, giving NASA back to James Fletcher stands out. Dr. Fletcher was NASA Administrator from 1971 to 1977, while the shuttle was being designed and tested, or not tested. It was he who convinced Congress to fund the current design, claiming that it would eventually deliver payloads to orbit for a mere $100 a pound. The cost is now $5,264 a pound, which is nearly a twentyfold increase, allowing for inflation.

The New York Times ran two long articles on the 23rd and 24th of April—not coincidentally, the days Fletcher’s appointment was being reviewed by Congress—detailing the excesses of his earlier administration. Still projecting the “can-do” reputation it earned during the Apollo years, NASA was actually a stew of inefficiency spiced with occasionally actionable neglect and criminal conduct. The Times article details a few whoppers where NASA actually outdoes the Pentagon, like paying Boeing $315 for metal loops available from government sources for three cents, or giving Morton Thiokol $3.6 million in rent for a building the government had owned recently and sold for $300,000. More damning, though, is the consistent refusal to correct deficiencies in management, testing, contractor relationships, and cost projection, pointed out in more than 500 audits of the agency. Fletcher defends his refusal by claiming that what needed fixing was actually just a matter of opinion, his versus the auditors’. The auditors might have seen their function differently.

Some congressional aides must have read the Times article, and since it was on the front page both days, a few Congresspersons might even have noticed it, but it didn’t slow down the appointment noticeably. Fletcher repaid Congress for its generosity in June, when the Challenger Commission report came out, saying, “Congress has provided excellent oversight and generous funding and in no way that I know of contributed to the accident.” That is purest K-Y Jelly. The shuttle program was notoriously underfunded and under constant pressure to attain unrealistic goals—including the laughable one of eventually turning a profit. (No unmanned NASA system had ever come out in the black, even without the liability of carrying along food, air, water, and people.)

Fletcher did gracefully accept part of the blame for the Challenger accident, saying, “The fault was not with any single person or group but was NASA’s fault, and I include myself as a member of the NASA team.” Most people would say he was more than just a member.

Appendix B

The Shuttle and Science in the Future

1986 was going to be the most active year yet for science aboard the shuttle—and possibly a turning point in astronomy as important as the invention of the telescope. The Galileo Project was supposed to fly by an asteroid on the way to Jupiter, and then drop a probe into that planet’s atmosphere, after surveying its larger satellites. The Ulysses Solar Polar mission would also have gone to Jupiter, using the huge planet’s gravity to fling it back toward the Sun, to fly over its polar regions, invisible from here. There were other, smaller, experiments in astronomy and space sciences, and another Spacelab, but the most important mission by far was to have been the Hubble Space Telescope, a huge machine built literally to see to the edge of the universe.

Even in the best of all worlds, none of these could fly soon. The Hubble telescope takes up all of the shuttle’s cargo bay and part of another flight’s. (It requires two data relay satellites; one was aboard the Challenger when it exploded.) The two Jupiter-bound probes have to be launched within fairly tight windows, that occur only once each thirteen months.

In June, the picture became even more bleak for the Jupiter-bound ones, when NASA announced that they would no longer use the shuttle to launch the Centaur upper stage, which both of them require. Astronauts were nervous about having 20,000 pounds of explosive fuel in the cargo bay. Now both of them will have to fly on the Titan, which is also grounded pending redesign.

Any scientific launch has to compete with Star Wars and paying customers. The order of priority for the shuttle’s payloads has always gone like this:

1. Military satellites.

2. Payloads that have to be launched within a specific time period.

3. Payloads from paying commercial or foreign customers.

4. NASA space science projects.

The Congressional Budget Office’s report The Budget Effects of the Challenger Accident says that of the first twenty shuttle flights when the program becomes regular again, at least fifteen will be given to the military. Now that the Galileo and solar polar flights have been bumped, the Hubble Space Telescope may have a chance of being one, or one and a half, of the remaining five. The new Spacelab, with its European backing, might also get one of the early tickets, to help boost international confidence in the American program.

Of course no one can yet say when regular flights will be resumed. At this writing, the first test flight may be as early as next July or as late as February, 1988. A lot hangs on the redesign of the booster; how smoothly the testing goes. You know it will go cautiously.