Titan. Stephen Baxter
He counted on his fingers. ‘There are two operational articles – AS – 514 and – 515, from the deleted Moon flights – at JSC and Michoud. Then you have two test articles, AS – 500D and – 500T, at Marshall and Kennedy. I guess bringing them up to specification would be more of a challenge, but I bet it could be done.’ White looked triumphant, somehow vindicated, Benacerraf thought. ‘I’d love to see those birds fired off at last, after all these years. The idea of those spaceships just lying around in the rain has always bugged me …’
‘And if we can do that,’ Angel said, ‘then it’s feasible. We have enough heavy-lift capability.’ He looked at Rosenberg and laughed. ‘Good grief, Rosenberg. I think we’ve done it; we’ve found a way to close the design.’
Libet looked confused, as this talk swirled around her. ‘What are you talking about?’
Mott took her hand and squeezed it gently. ‘Saturn Vs,’ she said. ‘They’re talking about flying Saturn Vs again …’
‘Oh,’ said Libet. ‘Oh, my God.’
They talked on, debating details and approaches, as the candles burned steadily down.
The one topic they never approached – as if skirting around it – was the risk.
If the risk of not returning from an Apollo flight had been something like one in ten – and most engineers agreed the risk on Shuttle was around one in a hundred – and given the distances and the extent of this venture outside of the experience base and the difficulty of maintaining political will behind a project spanning so many years – what was the risk of not returning from Titan?
A lot worse than fifty-fifty, Benacerraf thought. Each of them, here, was signing up for Russian roulette, with the barrels loaded against them. And each of them had to know that.
But they were prepared to go anyhow. They all had to be crazy, by any conventional definition.
They were a motley crew, Benacerraf thought: Rosenberg the dreamer, Fahy the tough, wounded engineer, Angel the burned-up, goal-oriented drinker, White the stranded Moonwalker, Libet and Mott younger, enigmatic, but still, she sensed, touched with the wanderlust. And herself: determined to do something with the rest of her life other than just survive Columbia.
Flawed people, all of them. And not one of them had anything to live for that was more meaningful than dreams of a jaunt to Titan.
Maybe that was necessary; maybe it had always been true. Who else would go on such a mission? Nobody happy with her life, that was for sure.
And who would come up with such a vision, she thought, but a misfit like Rosenberg? Rosenberg, with his sense of his place in the cosmos – a sense of depth, change, flux – that sense that he doesn’t belong here, that he’s a mere conduit of celestial matters and forces …
Yeah. A better sense of the Universe than of what’s going on in the heads of his fellow human beings.
Maybe NASA had been wise, all these years, to neglect the psychology of its space travellers. Maybe that was the only possible approach. In this room alone there was probably enough material for a three-day shrinks’ conference.
But what the hell. All that mattered was that she had her team.
And it was some dream. With a colony on Titan – even one scraping a precarious living from the slush – it just wouldn’t be possible for the folks here at home to slump back into some kind of flat-Earth mentality. The Universe would always be alive, with humans living on an island up in the sky.
Maybe, she thought, Rosenberg is single-handedly saving the future.
Now, she thought wryly, all they had to do was convince NASA, the Government, and the rest of the goddamn human race to let them do this. The real work started here.
Kevin, the housekeeper, came in to clear up the dishes and deliver coffee and more drinks. Benacerraf watched him as he worked, the heady talk of Titan and Shuttle-Cs and Apollos flowing around him. Kevin’s smooth, moonlike face was blank, incurious; Benacerraf doubted he heard a word that was said.
He had a new image-tattoo on his forehead, Benacerraf saw. The lozenge-shaped patch of glowing photochemicals cycled through images of smoky star-clusters, evidently downloaded from one of the Hubble picture libraries.
She found she’d made her decision.
Here, in this room, she thought, it starts. And it won’t end until we land on Titan.
As he left, Marcus White winked at Benacerraf. ‘Everest, El Dorado, Mayflower. I don’t know whether we’re going to Titan or not, or why the hell. But you sure do throw one great party, kid.’
The first task was to flesh out the mission profile.
Benacerraf set Barbara Fahy working on the feasibility of adapting mission control software and techniques to handle the Saturn and Shuttle-C launches, and the extended mission profile after that.
She quickly came back to Benacerraf with a schedule and costing. Fahy had shown how STS mission control techniques could be adapted with a little effort to run Shuttle-C and revived Saturn programs. Then, looking ahead for a feasible way to run a manned mission to Saturn, Fahy argued that you didn’t want to have a full team of controllers employed for all six or eight or ten years. Fahy’s projection showed how a scaled-down Mission Control operation would suffice to run the flight itself after the initial interplanetary injection sequence; hands-off techniques developed to run extended Earth-orbit operations aboard Station could be adapted. It would be necessary to rehire staff or attach contract workers during the later crucial mission phases, like a Jupiter encounter. But it could all be done for a containable cost.
Benacerraf was working to a timetable she hadn’t yet shared with many people. And to her, the setup schedule even for this ground-based aspect of the mission looked tight. But then, everything would be tight, pushing against the clock, until the last Shuttle lifted off the pad …
Benacerraf worked through Fahy’s case carefully.
Barbara Fahy was almost pathetically eager to work on this proposal, to find some way of redeeming her self-respect after being lead Flight on Columbia. It seemed to do no good to point out that Fahy was not responsible for the hardware and testing flaws that had led to the orbiter’s destruction, that no blame had been attached to her – that, in fact, her career had been done no perceptible damage at all.
As far as Fahy was concerned, it had been her mission. And she’d lost it.
Still, her judgement was unimpaired; her work on this issue looked good.
Benacerraf accepted the recommendation, but a seed of doubt lodged in her mind. A scaled down Mission Control would be fine, but if some kind of Apollo 13 situation blew up, halfway to Jupiter, the crew would need fast backup by experts on the ground: revised procedures, survival techniques, simulator proving … there mightn’t be time to hire up and train the people needed.
Anyhow, with that basic framework in hand, Barbara Fahy called in the senior members of her control team, and, with Benacerraf, talked them through the proposed flight.
They listened in silence – stunned, frightened silence, Benacerraf thought.
If NASA sent a spacecraft to Saturn, it would be these young, smart people – or their peers – who would have the responsibility for seeing that all the burns happened at the right times, for the right durations, with the spacecraft in the right attitudes; they would have to oversee navigation all the way to Titan, and prepare abort contingency plans.
There was a lot of scepticism. Even hostility. ‘How do you think we’re gonna do this?’ ‘We can’t possibly. All our systems are designed for low Earth orbit missions.’ ‘How can you think –’
Fahy knew her people, however, and she let them run down. ‘Just chew it over for a few days,’ she told them. ‘You don’t have to come up with all the answers at once. And