Titan (13 page)

J
ake Hadamard called Benacerraf.
She was in her room in the Astronaut Office at JSC, poring over a technical reconstruction of the multiple failures that had destroyed
Columbia
’s APUs.

“Hi. I’m here at JSC. Look, I need to talk to you. Can you get away?”

When she heard the Administrator’s dry voice, she felt pressure piling up on top of her, a force as tangible as the deceleration which had dragged her down into her canvas seat, during that last reentry from space. What now? “Do you want me to come over?”

“No. Let’s get out of here, for a couple of hours. Meet me at the Public Affairs Office parking lot…”

It was a bizarre request, but Benacerraf sure as hell needed a break. She pulled on a light white sweatshirt and a broad-brimmed hat, and went out to the elevator.

It was three P.M. on a hot July afternoon.

She emerged into a Mediterranean flat heat—after the dry, cold air-conditioning it was like walking into a wall of dampness—and she was immersed in the steady chirp of crickets. She walked across the courtyard of the JSC campus towards Second Street, which led to the main gate.

The blocky black and white buildings of JSC were scattered over the landscaped lawns like children’s blocks, with big black nursery-style identifying numbers on their sides. Between the buildings were Chinese tallow trees and tough, thick-bladed, glowing green Texas grass; sprinklers seemed to work all the time, hissing peacefully, a sound that always reminded her of a Joni Mitchell album she’d gotten too fond of in her teenage years.

But JSC was showing its age. Most of the buildings were more than forty years old; despite the boldness of the chunky 1960s style the buildings themselves were visibly aging, and after decades of budget cutbacks looked shabby: the concrete stained, the paint peeling. On her first visits here she’d been struck by the narrow corridors and gloomy ceiling tiles of many of the older buildings; it was more like some beat-up welfare agency than the core of a space program.

As he’d promised, Jake Hadamard was waiting for her at the car park close to the PAO. The lot was pretty full: old hands said wearily that there hadn’t been so much press interest in NASA since
Challenger.

They piled into Hadamard’s car. It was a small ‘00 Dodge. He drove out through the security barrier, down Second Street, and towards NASA Road One, the public highway. Hadamard grinned. “I have a limousine here I can use, with a driver,” he said. “But my job is kind of diffuse. I like to be able to do things personally from time to time.”

Benacerraf said, “So, you drive for release.”

“I guess.”

To the right of Second Street, which ran through the heart of JSC, was the Center’s rocket garden. There was a Little Joe—a test rocket for Apollo—and a Mercury-Redstone, looking absurdly small and delicate. The black-and-white-striped Redstone booster was just a simple tube, so slim the Mercury capsule’s heat shield overhung it. The Redstone was upright but braced against wind damage with wires; it looked, Benacerraf thought, as if it had been tied to the Earth, Gulliverstyle. And, just before the big stone LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER entry sign at NASA One, they passed, on the right, the Big S itself: a Saturn V moon rocket, complete with Apollo, broken into pieces and lying on its side.

A small group of tourists, evidently bussed over from the visitors’ center, Space Center Houston, hung about in front of the Redstone. They wore shorts and baseball caps, and their bare skin was coated With image-tattoos, and they looked up at the Redstone with baffled incomprehension.

But then, Benacerraf thought, it was already more than four decades since Alan Shepard’s first sub-orbital lob in a tin can like this. Two generations. No wonder these young bedecked visitors looked on these crude Cold War relics with bemusement.

Hadamard pulled out onto NASA Road One, and headed west. As he drove he sat upright, his gray-blond hair close-cropped, his hands resting confidently on the wheel as the car’s internal processor took them smoothly through the traffic.

They cut south down West NASA Boulevard, and pulled off the road and into a park. Hadamard drove into a parking area. The lot was empty save for a big yellow school bus.

“Let’s walk,” Hadamard said.

They got out of the car.

The park was wide, flat, tree-lined, green. The air was still, silent, save for the sharp-edged rustle of crickets, and the distant voices of a bunch of children, presumably decanted from the bus. Benacerraf could see the kids in the middle distance, running back and forth, some kind of sports day.

Hadamard, wearing neat dark sunglasses and a NASA baseball cap, led the way across the field.

Benacerraf took a big breath of air, and swung her arms around in the empty space.

Hadamard grinned at her, and his shades cast dazzling highlights. “Feels like coming home, huh.”

“You bet.” She thought about it. “You know, I don’t think I’ve walked on grass, except for taking short cuts across the JSC campus, since I got back from orbit.”

“You should get out more.” He scuffed at the grass with his patent leather shoes. “This is where we belong, after all. Here, on Earth, where we’ve spent four billion years adapting to the weather.”

“So you don’t think we ought to be traveling in space.”

He shrugged, and patted at his belly. “Not in this kind of design. A big heavy bag of water. Spacecraft are mostly plumbing, after all… Humans don’t belong up there.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Well, they don’t. You should hear what the scientists say to me. Every time someone sneezes on Station, a microgravity protein growth experiment is wrecked.”

Benacerraf said, “You’re repeating the criticisms that are coming out in the Commission hearings. You know, it’s like 1967 over again, after the Apollo fire.”

“Yes, but back then they managed to restrict the inquiries afterward to a NASA internal investigation. And that meant they could keep most of the recommendations technical rather than managerial.”

Benacerraf grunted. “Neat trick.”

Hadamard laughed. “Well, the Administrator back then was a wily old fox who knew how to play those guys up on the Hill.

But I’m no Jim Webb. After
Challenger
we had a Presidential Commission, just like the one that we’re facing now.”

They reached the woods, and the seagull-like cries of the children receded.

Eventually they came to a glade. A monument stood on a little square of bark-covered ground, enclosed by the trees, and the dappled sunlight reflected from its upper surface. It was boxlike, waist high, and constructed of some kind of black granite.

It was peaceful here. She wondered what the hell Hadamard wanted.

Jake Hadamard took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and looked at Benacerraf. “Paula, do you know where you are? When I first came to work at NASA, I was struck by the—” he hesitated “—the invisibility of the
Challenger
incident. I mean, there are plenty of monuments around JSC to the great triumphs of the past, like
Apollo 11.
Pictures on the walls, the flight directors’ retirement plaques, Mission Control in Building 30 restored 1960s style as a national monument, for God’s sake.

“But
Challenger
might never have happened.

“It’s the same if you go around the Visitors’ Center. You have your Lego exhibits and your Station displays and your pigiron toy Shuttles in the playground, and that inspirational music playing on a tape loop all the time. But again,
Challenger
might never have happened.

“Outside
NASA, it’s different. For the rest of us,
Challenger
was one of the defining moments of the 1980s. The moment when a dream died.”

He said
us.
Benacerraf found the word startling; she studied Hadamard with new interest.

He said, “Look around Houston and Clear Lake. You have
Challenger
malls and car lots and drug stores… And look at this monument.”

Benacerraf bent to see. The monument’s white lettering had weathered badly, but she could still make out the Harris County shield inset on the front, and, on the top, the mission patch for
Challenger’s
final flight: against a Stars-and-Stripes background, the doomed orbiter flying around Earth, with those seven too-familiar names around the rim: McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Scobee, Smith, Jarvis, McAuliffe.

“We’re in the
Challenger Seven
Memorial Park,” Hadamard said. “You see, what’s interesting to me is that this little monument wasn’t raised by NASA, but by the local people.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at, Jake.”

“I’m trying to understand how, over two decades, these NASA people have come to terms with the
Challenger
thing. Because I need to learn how to size up the recommendations I’m getting from you for the way forward after
Columbia.”

Benacerraf said, “You want to know if you can trust us.”

He didn’t smile.

“NASA people didn’t launch that Chinese girl into orbit,” she said. “And that’s the source of the pressure on you to come up with some way to keep flying.”

“Is it?”

Benacerraf decided to probe. “You know, now that I’m getting to know you, you aren’t what I expected.”

He smiled. “Not just a bean counter, a politico on the make? Paula, I am both of those things. I’m not going to deny it, and I’m not ashamed of either of them. We need politicos and bean counters to make our world go round. But—”

“What?”

“I wasn’t born an accountant. I was seventeen when
Apollo
11 landed. I painted my room black with stars, and had a big Moon map on the ceiling—”

“You?”

“Sure.”

“And you’re the NASA Administrator.”

He shrugged. “I’m the Administrator who was on watch when
Columbia
turned into a footprint on that salt lake.

“I’m going through hell, frankly, facing that White House Commission. Phil Gamble is getting the whipping in the media, but the Commission are just beating up on me. And then there’s the pressure from the Air Force. You know, over the years the Air Force has made some big mistakes chasing manned spaceflight. They wasted a lot of money on projects that didn’t come to fruition: the X-20 spaceplane, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory… In the 1970s they were pushed into relying on the Shuttle as their sole launch vehicle. That single space policy mistake cost them twenty billion dollars, they tell me, in today’s money. And now we got
Columbia,
and the fleet is grounded again. You can bet that if Shuttle never flies again, there will be plenty in USAF who won’t shed a tear.

“Now, facing lobbies like that, with institutional rivalries going back a half century, I sure as hell am not prepared to go to 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 hody. “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 U.S. 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.”