Titan. Stephen Baxter
Talk to the guys at JPL, about interplanetary navigation techniques. I know it’s one hell of a challenge, guys, the biggest since Apollo –’
‘But,’ said one languid young man – introduced by Fahy as Gary Munn – ‘those 1960s guys could look forward to some kind of career within NASA. More than one mission, a future. Not just a one-off stunt like this.’
Fahy glared at him. ‘We’re talking about going to Saturn, for God’s sake. The greatest adventure in human history. A journey that will be talked about as long as mankind survives. An exploration that even eclipses Armstrong’s. Don’t you care about being a part of that?’
But Munn just stared back, his expression unreadable to Benacerraf.
I really don’t understand this new generation, she thought.
After a couple of days, Benacerraf had Fahy and her planners host a wider meeting at which the details of the mission were explored. Big, powerful suites of trajectory-mapping software – primed with precise predictions of the planets’ positions for decades to come – were deployed by the planners, running through option after option, with mission duration and initial mass in Earth orbit numbers scrolling over spread-out softscreens.
The programs soon converged on an optimal trajectory. It was essentially similar to the complex path taken by Cassini to make the same trip, with the early part of the trajectory wrapped around the inner planets, slingshots off Earth and Venus, before unwinding towards the outer Solar System, and a final gravity assist from Jupiter. The meeting argued around the details and parameters, before settling on a recommendation:
To launch in January, 2008.
It would be, Benacerraf realized, one hell of a tight development schedule. Maybe even unachievable.
But it fit her internal timetable. It would be a whole year before Maclachlan was scheduled to take office and ground everything, and only a year for the bad guys in the USAF and beyond to find a way to close down NASA, and maybe not so far in the future that all of the current post-Chinese push back into space had worn off.
There really was no choice. The window of opportunity was closing quickly. If Americans were going to travel beyond the Moon, it would have to be in 2008. Or never.
Benacerraf studied the smooth trajectory curves scrolling across the softscreens. ‘We understand this stuff so well,’ she said to Fahy. ‘It’s astonishing how quickly we can produce material like this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Barbara Fahy said sourly. ‘Our civilization has become expert at interplanetary navigation. It’s just that we’ve chosen to abandon the capability to do any of it.’
‘Actually,’ Gary Munn said brightly, ‘we can run the projections forward and back. Even as far back as the 1960s there were proposals to slingshot off Venus and fly to Mars, and so forth, in the near future of the time; it’s interesting to move the planets back to their configurations, in 1982 or 1986, and see how accurately those old guys got their predictions.’ He worked his keypad briskly, and Benacerraf watched trajectory curves wrap around the sun, depicting the paths of spacecraft that never were, travelling to Mars in 1982 and 1986 and 1992.
To Benacerraf, this precise, beautiful, useless rendering of all those lost missions was painful, almost physically.
Munn whistled as he worked the programs.
Benacerraf called in Mal Beardsley, her assistant program manager responsible for flight safety.
Mal was a bluff old-timer who had come in from solid-booster supplier Morton Thiokol after the Challenger accident, and he thought she was crazy. They spent a half-hour Benacerraf couldn’t really afford debating the pros and cons of the mission.
Beardsley left the room, grinning and tapping his greying temple. It was a reaction that Benacerraf figured she was going to have to get used to, and she forced a smile.
Still, Beardsley had a report in her softscreen within two days.
Beardsley had tried to devise abort options for the Titan mission.
A key objective in NASA mission planning had always been to provide abort options. And that philosophy had borne a lot of fruit. Even the use of the Lunar Module as a lifeboat, after the Apollo 13 Service Module was crippled, had been practised on an earlier flight. After Challenger, many more abort possibilities were built into the Shuttle mission profile, particularly the ascent phase. It all increased the survivability of the flights, on paper and in practice.
The flight to Earth orbit would be no real problem; standard Shuttle abort modes would be sufficient. And after the Titan ship left orbit, firing up its Shuttle main engines, abort options were still available: for instance, if the main engines malfunctioned, they could be shut down and the smaller OMS and RCS engines used to bring the craft around a huge U-turn and back to Earth. That would work up to a point, anyhow. Once the main engines had burned for long enough to apply more delta-vee than the OMS and RCS could compensate for, the crew would be committed to an interplanetary flight of some kind. But even here, aborts were possible. The craft could modify its trajectory and slingshot around Venus, back to an early rendezvous with Earth. Even a slingshot back home around Jupiter would be possible.
Of course the problems of reentry from such an interplanetary jaunt would be formidable. Beardsley figured that the Apollo Command Modules, which had been built to withstand a direct entry into Earth’s atmosphere from the Moon, would be the most survivable possibility for the crew, and he recommended strongly against weakening the Apollos’ heatshields.
It would be one hell of an abort, however, Benacerraf reflected: the round trip to Venus or Jupiter would take months, even years, during which time the crew would presumably be struggling to survive in a crippled ship.
Past Jupiter, even Beardsley could find no meaningful aborts.
She started to make contacts with other senior NASA managers.
One of the first was with the JSC director, a tough, cost-conscious woman in her sixties called Millie Rimini. Benacerraf walked up two flights of stairs to Rimini’s office, and took in Barbara Fahy to give her pitch more technical plausibility.
Rimini’s job, as Benacerraf understood it, was – post-Columbia – to manage the rundown of JSC, to complete a part of Hadamard’s greater mission. So Benacerraf pitched the Titan mission as part makework, part cosmetic. Maybe the mission would actually save some jobs, at JSC. At worst, it would create a buzz of enthusiasm and raise morale; being able to work on a new program would sweeten the pill, for many, of the transfers and early retirements and layoffs that were to come. And so on. And the same applied to all the NASA centers.
Benacerraf had run big-budget engineering projects before; she knew how these things worked. People weren’t usually selfless; people sought to achieve their own personal goals, and treated projects as an arena in which to achieve those goals. In successful projects, the goals of the key players were in line with those of the project. Thus, managers like Rimini had to see benefits for themselves in the proposal, ways they could use it to achieve their own objectives, even as the Shuttles lifted off for Saturn. It was up to Benacerraf to figure out those benefits and present them.
It took a morning to convince Rimini that they should work seriously on this.
After that, Rimini encouraged Benacerraf to take the proposal to a wider group of NASA managers. Rimini set up a meeting at Marshall Spaceflight Center, in Alabama, of senior officials from Houston, the Cape, and Marshall, and from relevant NASA internal divisions. Rimini chaired the meeting.
Benacerraf was surprised to meet some opposition from the hard-line space buffs in some of the centers. The Cape managers, primed by a sweet-talk approach by Marcus White, could see no show-stopper obstacles to refurbishing a Saturn launch complex, given the time and money. And the Shuttle-C flights would just be variants on STS launch procedures they’d already run a hundred and forty-three times – simplified variants, at that. But the old guys from Marshall, with their tough, conservative,