Voyage (78 page)

Later she went out to the Michoud plant in New Orleans, where the big External Tanks were being constructed. She spent longer there; she was being encouraged to make the Tanks a specialty during the mission.

The warehouses were immense caverns, big enough to hold the Tanks in great cylindrical chunks. She watched the manufacture of a bulkhead, a huge dome which would cap the big liquid hydrogen tank. The dome came in pie-shaped aluminum slices called gores, which needed manufacturing precision far beyond the capability of
any hydraulic press. So a forming die, with a flat sheet of aluminum on top, was sunk to the bottom of a sixty-thousand-gallon water tank, and a pattern of explosives was laid over the top. The gore was blasted into shape by surging shock waves.

York was awed by the scale of this enterprise. As she pursued her studies she became fascinated by the Tanks, even though they were perhaps the most mundane item in the whole mission.

Each Tank contained two massive, domed canisters, of propellant and oxidizer, connected by a cylindrical ring. The Tanks were coated with four inches of polyurethane foam and reflective shielding, to reduce boiloff of the cryogenic propellants. Inside the Tanks there were zero-G screens and cage-like baffles designed to stop the liquids sloshing during engine fire; the liquids were so heavy – more than two million pounds per tank – that the whole booster cluster could be thrown out of control by a severe enough slosh. And there were anti-vortex baffles, like huge propeller blades, to prevent the build-up of whirlpools – like those above the plughole of a draining bath – that could suck bubbles of vapor into the feed pipes …

Because of the need for extreme reliability, and the extraordinary range of conditions a spacecraft faced, every component of Ares contained a hell of a lot more engineering than she’d expected from outside the program. Even these simple babies, the Tanks. And because of the limited opportunities to test, traceability was essential: the ability to trace the life history of the humblest component right back to the ore from which it was smelted, to aid analysis in case of a failure.

This was the kind of level of detail which passed by people – including Capitol Hill decision makers – who balked at the price of components NASA ordered.
You want to spend how much, just on a goddamn gas can?

When she was at sites like Michoud – in the thick of the program – the discouragement of Romero’s resignation, and the skepticism, even downright hostility, of some sections of the press to the mission, all fell away from her.
How could I turn down a Saturn
? It would hurl her to Mars, to perform experiments of huge importance. A billion dollars were being invested in her, a billion eyes would be on her to do a good job.

At places like Michoud, she would become convinced that the price she was paying – all the Astronaut Office bullshit, the disruption of her career, the compromises of the science, the laying waste of her personal life – all of it was justified.

… We see that a manned space mission may be viewed as a complex biotechnical and sociotechnical system consisting of manufactured and human parts. A thorough understanding of the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the Mars mission is crucial for reducing the probability of malfunction of the human part of the system, independently of the structural, mechanical and electronic elements, thereby forcing the readjustment of the system as a whole. Psychological and interpersonal stresses may be reduced through environmental engineering, manipulating crew composition, and the structuring of situations and tasks …

To York, the psych experts’ pseudo-scientific lectures – and the role-playing group exercises, and the individual and group psych analyses the crew had to endure – were the worst part of the premission training. They were invariably excruciatingly dull, or profoundly embarrassing, or both.

York had little experience of the soft sciences; and she was dismayed by how limited the underlying thinking was – even here, in the money-no-object space program. Some of the theories that were being applied to her and her crewmates seemed speculative at best. And it was clear that the study of group psychology – as opposed to an individual’s psychology – was still primitive.

Also, more fundamentally, experience of long-duration spaceflight was still so small that there was hardly any evidence to back up the guidelines and techniques being taught to them.

A deep space mission like Ares was basically unprecedented. So, to figure out what might befall the mental state of a Mars crew, the research psychologists were having to work from case studies of analogous situations – undersea habitats, nuclear submarines, polar research stations, isolated Canadian villages – and they used data from sensory deprivation experiments, sleeplessness studies, and work on social isolation. And sometimes, it seemed to York, they pushed those analogies a little far.

She’d got used to the idea that the Ares flight would take aerospace technology to its limit. It was disturbing to her that the softer disciplines, like psychology, would be pushing at the edge of their envelope too.

It was disturbing that in this fundamental aspect of the mission, nobody actually knew if the crew could survive the flight.

Later, from Vladimir Viktorenko, York started to learn something of how the Soviets handled such matters.

Small things
: the Soviet mission planners would plan the selection of food to suit the taste of the crew. Color schemes for
the spacecraft’s walls and equipment would be adjusted carefully. There would be music, on personal players, to suit individual preference. There would be recordings of simple sounds from home: bird songs, waves on a sea shore, falling rain. Cosmonauts were even encouraged to take living things into orbit, perhaps as part of biology experiments: plants, grasses, tadpoles – little droplets of life, said Viktorenko, bits of Earth’s great ocean of existence.

The astronauts tended to dismiss the Soviets as backward, technically, compared to the US. But York decided she liked some aspects of the Soviet way. They’d come up with simple, practical, homely ways of dealing with the pink bodies inside the rockets.

She started bringing Viktorenko’s ideas into the psych sessions with Stone and Gershon.

‘… The sheer magnitude of the publicity program, I might say, is unmatched by anything we’ve seen since Apollo 11. The Voice of America is heavily involved, of course. We estimate that the VOA can reach twenty-seven percent of the world’s population outside the US. This is the biggest operation in their history. Pre-launch we’ll be sending out ten thousand forty-five-minute English-language tapes and scripts, to US Information Agency posts around the world. During the key phases of the mission the VOA will be broadcasting live commentary in seven major languages, and summaries in a further thirty-six.

‘We’re also sending out special pre-launch press materials, in addition to the regular NASA manned mission press kits we pouch out around the world. These include ninety news wire stories and features sent in the weeks before liftoff; the
Life
feature on you and your families; a forty-eight-page “Man on Mars” color illustrated pamphlet, four hundred twenty-two thousand copies of that; and one million, nine hundred thousand postcards of the astronauts, of you three. Also we anticipate having in place at the USIA outposts overseas a million Ares lapel buttons, nine full-size Mars-walk space suits, a hundred and twenty-five Ares kiosks, with lights, music, transparencies and posters. We’ve got ten thousand maps of Mars, eight hundred and forty plastic Saturn rockets, two hundred and fifty sixteen-inch Mars globes …’

The statistics went on and on, baffling, the slides bewildering.

For someone responsible for NASA’s PR, York thought, Rick Llewellyn’s speaking style was oddly drab, uninspiring. It was hard to fix your attention on him for much longer than a couple of
sentences at a time. It was like one of her early ground training classroom sessions: all those block diagrams, the endless, droning afternoons.

But the content of Llewellyn’s slide show was terrifying, if you thought about it too hard.

‘We’re already planning a world tour for you guys when you get back. Over forty-eight days you will visit thirty-five countries, meeting key groups of press, television, scientists, students and educators, as well as politicians. You’ll go to Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, England …

‘We set a couple of broad guidelines for the media stations around the world, a long way back in the mission planning. First, of course, Ares represents man on Mars, it’s a culmination of an age-old dream, it’s in the nature of man to accept difficult challenges, blah blah, all of that stuff. And then, historically, Ares is built on the achievement of many scientists, Newton and Goddard and von Braun. You know the score. And today Ares has a strong international flavor, with the overseas investigators, the open access to samples and data, the tracking stations around the world, the assistance from the Russians in your training, and so on. Additionally, of course, space is benefiting man – you have a lot of stuff here about the spin-offs – and you have the hope that Ares, spectacular off-Earth achievement as it is, represents a promise that man may eventually use his technologies to resolve the Earth’s intractable problems …’

Ares, as the shop window for technocratic solutions, York thought sourly. Jorge was right. It’s turned out just like Apollo after all
.

But today the mood was a little darker than in the 1960s. Today, you had Reagan’s Star Wars talk, of particle beams and lasers and smart bullets. Space was again an arena for flexing national muscles. And Ares was being used, blatantly, by the Reagan Administration to appease national and international sensibilities about the aggressive use of space technology. Ares had become twinned with the Star Wars initiative in the media. Ares was the dreaming half of the US space program, coupled to its threatening sibling. Maybe that had been the Administration’s intention all along, when they approved Joe Muldoon’s reshaping of the mission back in ’81.

She could see the hand of Fred Michaels in this, still pulling strings, even from his retirement in Dallas. Michaels had locked Ares together with SDI in the mind of Reagan – and of the public and Congress. As long as Reagan kept on pumping billions of
dollars into military spending, some of that was going to flow into NASA, to sustain Ares. It was smart footwork by Michaels. Even if it was, she reflected, completely amoral. Do
anything, say anything – just keep the mission progressing
.

Meanwhile, every news item about her mission – every gimmick, every toy, every image – had multiple meanings, she saw: Ares, as a geopolitical symbol; Ares, as an ad for technocracy.

It would probably always be like that. To gain political advantage was the only reason, really, why any Government would fund travel into space.

And now here was she, Natalie York, the great skeptic about space, being transformed into one of the great icons of the deadly space glamor business.

She looked up at the screen, at a thousand reproductions of her own face, and shivered.

The tours, the press conferences, the photo-opportunities continued.

Her message was formulaic, coached by the Public Affairs Office people.
I need you! Do good work!

And everywhere she went, there were
people
: thousands of them, all gazing at her, smiling, with an odd pregnant distance about them. As if they longed to touch her. And always, they applauded her.

She hadn’t thought much about the future. To her, ‘after the mission’ was so remote it might as well not exist; it was as if her whole life was going to end, at the moment she stepped into the Command Module.

But her life afterwards would, inexorably, go on. And in a sense nothing she actually did on Mars – not even her precious geology – would matter so much as the simple fact that she was there.

She thought of the looks on the faces of the press and public, as they gazed on people who had been into space, to the Moon.
When I get back they will look at me in the same way. They do even now. And they’ve a right to; it’s their money
.

And what about herself? Would she become like Joe Muldoon, a kind of walking ghost, her life transformed by her brief, dreamlike – and forever unrepeated – interval on Mars?

She began to see a darker side to the fascination with which people regarded her. Sure, they wanted to witness this woman – this otherwise ordinary person – who might walk on Mars, take an unimaginable evolutionary step on their behalf.

But they also thought she might die.

The little cemetery struck York as classic small-town: neat, well-tended, the white marble gravestones gleaming in their rows. The open grave was like a wound in the cultivated soil, waiting to be healed.

Somehow, the astronauts, current and former, among the mourners at the grave side – Joe Muldoon, Phil Stone, others – didn’t look out of place here, in their crisp black suits, their military bearing. Astronauts were small-town heroes to perfection, nothing more, nothing less.

The day was glorious, the sky an infinite blue, the sunlight sharp with the edge of early spring.

York felt numb, empty, unable to mourn.

Peter Priest had died a squalid death, of a cocaine overdose, at age twenty-five. He’d pissed away his life, she thought brutally, and achieved nothing; what the hell was there to mourn in that? And she shouldn’t feel guilty for her absence of feeling. The kid would probably have opposed this heavyweight turnout for his funeral anyhow; it was all his mother’s idea.

York remembered the little boy who’d gone running around the nuclear rocket plant, all those years ago. What did his death mean, now? Was it somehow linked to that long-ago day at Jackass Flats – to the space program in general, to its obsessive dedication to its goals – to his father’s final consumption by it?

And how did this new, grisly, numbing event cast light on her own ambiguous relationship with Ben?