Chapter 27: Kings of the High Frontier
CHAPTER 27 It [NASA's Challenger story] just unraveled like Watergate. We felt betrayed. It was one thing to understand the technical reasons for the solid rocket explosion. But NASA had always put its people above everything. To hear how they put off and covered up the needed repairs and how it killed your friends is a little hard to take. -- ex-astronaut John Fabian 21 March One week after the Constitution tragedy, NASA finally released the body count: 2,105 dead, 658 hospitalized, another thousand or more treated and released. Among the dead were Vice President Schield and family; five senators, sixteen representatives, and dozens of legislators from space-industry states; Britain's Prime Minister and his wife; the Secretary General of the United Nations; two-time Academy Award-winning actor Randolph Trent; several heads of small foreign states; the governor of Florida and her husband; three venerable network news anchors; the CEO of Hayes Polysulphide; Japan's foreign trade minister; the Russian Space Agency representative; the top man at CNES in France; Karl Ganzel, the top scientist-advisor to the National Organisation of Space Supporters; a high school marching band from Ames, Iowa; family members of the Constitution crew; and eighty-five percent of Launch Control personnel including the Director. Astronaut manager Bryan Kirk was among the names listed under MISCELLANEOUS PERSONNEL. Among the survivors -- amazingly, though lost in the general climate of shock and mourning -- were two members of the Constitution: Samantha Madison and Nikolai Gagarin. Both had been seated in the mid-deck. When the shuttle cartwheeled, the crew cabin broke loose and slammed into Launch Control as a nearly intact piece. The flight deck crumpled, killing four, and the other two on the mid-deck died of internal injuries while awaiting rescue. The remaining two, though, had survived because their intact PEAP's, the breathing apparatus, provided them with oxygen amid the smoking ruins until a member of a body-removal team reached the crew cabin four hours after the crash. Both were comatose, in critical condition, and not expected to live. The world mourned, at least that was what the press insisted. Flocks of child psychologists descended upon schools in an effort to locate and soothe any traumatized ids. Finding only a few, they worked diligently at opening up repressed emotions with video replays of the disaster, followed by art and writing projects designed to elicit the hidden pain. After a while, they discovered all the anguish they knew had to have been there. Grants to study the effects of the tragedy were swiftly filed and approved. Congress, mourning the deaths of its members and of the Vice-President, launched an inquiry into the cause of the disaster, headed in the House by Ludlow Woolsey IV, chairman of the Space Science and Applications Subcommittee, which lost two members in the holocaust. President Nolan Crane, still stinging from the leak of his first words upon hearing of the disaster -- "Was that the one with the UN guys on it?" -- called for an independent blue ribbon committee to be chaired by the one man all the world could trust to be impartial and insightful, Barry Gibbon, Ph.D. Damage assessment continued. Pad 39A was a total loss. Pad 39B could be operational once the road connecting it to the Vehicle Assembly Building was repaired. Most of the bodies still could not be identified. The names in the death roll were assembled by implication: most of the survivors had been identified, so -- once crossed off the lists of those present at the VIP stands and those personnel clocking in to Launch Control -- the remaining list yielded the names of the likely dead. *** For the families of the dead, the tragedy assumed unspeakable proportions. For those intimately involved in the space program, the pain was heartfelt and personal. For most Americans, the sense of defeat and sadness varied from individual to individual. Among a small minority, the disaster evoked either a raging feeling of betrayal or a secret frisson of smug glee. Shocked into sobriety, Tammy Reis felt none of these emotions. Inside she was simply cold, her sensibilities as dead as the bodies of the two thousand-plus at KSC. She had been denied visitation to the ICU at Walter Reed, where Samantha had been delivered by military helicopter after stabilizing into her coma. Ex-astronaut non-relatives counted for little, even if Samantha was her closest female friend. So she sat in Jon Franck's living room with Jon and two others, awaiting the afternoon call from Samantha's brother. Afterward, they would call the homes of other astronauts and spread the word through the telephone tree. Then Jon would post an update on The Net. This had gone on for the latter half of the week. Most of the astronauts -- indeed, all of NASA -- had been cut adrift by the disaster. Their managers, superior officers, and many of their compatriots were nearly all dead or hospitalized. No one existed to give them orders, so they waited at home, some mourning, some awaiting progress reports, most simply on hold. The phone rang. Jon punched up the speaker. "Franck here." "Hi," Samantha's brother said in a weary but brightened tone. "The doctor says she's showing some intermittent signs of awareness." "Fantastic!" Franck said, adding "Pipe down!" to the astronauts around him who broke into cheers and applause. "What's it mean?" "It's a good sign, but she's still in ICU and will be until her internal injuries have healed more. Her mom and I... We brought her headset and powerglove and hooked her into some of her favorite music VR videos. The nurses all say that talking to her and playing the verves help. I've hooked up a recorder so if she opens her eyes to track the video or uses her glove to interact, we'll know the time and extent and whether it was conscious or reflexive." Reis cut in. "That's great, Garrick. Has she spoken?" "No, Tammy. And I asked again; they say no visitors except Mom and me. This place is crawling with Russians, though. I guess Gagarin's people have pull." Madison ended the call with a hasty goodbye. Tammy gazed at the others and broke the silence. "It's good news." "She'll wake up," one of the others said. "She's got what it takes to pull through." "What sort of world will she wake up to, though?" Franck said. "The new darkness after the false dawn?" An older astronaut, her black hair streaked with grey, said, "We've been through groundings before. After Apollo One, after Apollo Seventeen, after Skylab, after Challenger. None of them was the end of space flight." "This is," Tammy said, even though she agreed with the woman. She still clung to the faint hope that there was some way to set all of this right. That hope ebbed and receded on an almost daily basis. She thought back two years to the way she stalled Freespace Orbital's threat of competition. What if she had not interceded? What if she had simply warned Cooper the way Paul Volnos had warned her? Might Starblazer have been an operational launch system today, ready to take on at least part of the Shuttle's manifest? Could she have become a Freespace pilot? Something burned at the base of her throat like battery acid. Here she sat, setting the stage to foil another rival. "NASA will never recover," she said, not knowing whether she believed it or not. "Congress will never rebuild KSC. They'll turn it into a museum, wait and see." "There's always Vandenberg," the other woman said. "I hear it's being reactivated." Nods of agreement. "Polar inclinations and expensive doglegs to equatorial," one dissenter muttered. "No one's going to allow an eastern trajectory over the continent." "We'll rebuild!" the older astronaut insisted. "We've got to. America is our only hope for real space travel." "America maybe," Tammy said with a bitterness made all the more veritable because it was genuine, "but the United States, never. NASA never existed to get people into Space. It existed solely to monopolize Space. And now we have UNITO to do that! They'll just take NASA funding and ship it to Europe or Japan or Russia." Franck put a hand on her shoulder. "Tammy--" "What happened on Constitution was just a symptom," she said to no one in particular. And not even Jon was sure whether she meant the crash or her own incident. "The dream is dead, the dreamers are dead, and what you see is just opportunists feeding on the corpse!" She knew she had gone too far. She was supposed to develop an image of dissatisfaction and something within drove her beyond what was necessary. "I give up," she said quietly to Jon. "May I puke in your toilet and go home?" Franck gazed at her steadily. "I thought you were starting to show." She almost hissed at him. "It's a beer gut." "What are you going to do about it?" he whispered. "Poison it with whiskey," she muttered, elbowing past him toward the door. "No, Tammy! Don't start agai--" The door slammed shut. 31 March "It's desperation, don't you see?" Brodsky waved a hand toward the spacecraft's framework. "The DOD's just throwing some bucks at you to keep their options open. They have their Goliaths from regular stock and from the INERT transfer." Cooper shook his head. "Forget the Defense Department. That's just pocket change. Leora's the main source." "Tourism is a very volatile market. Don't count on--" "When did you become the naysayer, Thom? Look around you!" Cooper spun once, his arms outstretched. Nearly a hundred workers scurried about, laying lithium-aluminum frames into place. Heli-arc welders sparked and glowed with pure white light. The aroma of ozone and aluminum oxide filled the hangar air with the scent of progress. Computers encircling the work area each sported an operator surrounded by at least two kibbitzers flipping through stacks of spec sheets generated by the not-quite-paperless office. "We're doing it, Thom! Twenty years of dreaming, dreaming since we were kids and now it's going to happen! We've got brand new surplus engines coming in from Stratodyne, we've got a contract with Kelvin Kryogenic for fuel, ablative coating from DuPont... It's all coming together." Brodsky raised and lowered his shoulders in something more hopeful than a shrug. "I guess that I've spent so many years chronicling your setbacks and those of others that I just can't believe it." "Evolution," Cooper said. "It doesn't happen in a smooth continuum. It moves in fits and starts. Nothing happens for a long time, then in eight years you go from dogs in space to a man on the Moon. Then the doldrums set in for over a quarter of a century. I think we're ready to see a blossoming, a new dawn. And we'll be right there with Aurora... Hey! Starblazer is just the name for our class of spacecraft. Each ship needs its own name." He turned toward the conical framework and shouted. "She's going to be called Aurora!" A few workers heard and gave him a thumbs up. Thom smiled. "That's better than the name I'd thought of." At Cooper's smile of query, Thom said, "Back when it was a hybrid rocket -- solid fuel, liquid oxidizer -- I thought Chimæra might be appropriate." "A she-beast and an impossible fantasy, eh?" He watched the sparks for a few moments, then, clapped an arm around his friend's shoulder. "Fantasy no more, Thom. The dream is real." 1 April The FAA inspector grinned with pure joy at the sight of Poubelle's spaceplane. Parts of it had the black alloy skin in place, held on with aluminum clecoes that looked like stubby pencils sticking out of the rivet holes. In the open spaces, the big composite-material fuel tanks took up most of the fuselage. In the forward end, technicians wove smooth tresses of optical fibers from the cockpit to all parts of the frame. The system handled not only flight controls, but all sensors and data-gathering nodes. The inspector was a middle-aged man with a slight paunch and a perpetual glower; his pleasure upon viewing the work seemed so inappropriate. He circled the stubby-winged vehicle with a mixture of glee and respect. "Mr. Poubelle," he said to his host, "I have rarely seen such meticulous workmanship. Not even on airliners. The welds on the frame, the way your prepregs and composites cured, the thoroughness of your static load tests... Will she really take plus fifteen gees and minus nine?" Poubelle grinned. "She'll take it. I don't think I could, though. That's why I have the most advanced compact supercomputer linked to the fly-by-fiber." "That's my only problem. Just one computer. No backup. What if it fails?" "It's a massively parallel neural net computer. It's like the human brain: knock out every tenth neuron and it can still think well enough to maintain control. If the whole thing goes, well, Chemar and I will break up into little pieces over Arizona. Or over the Pacific, on the return home." "I just want to thank you for inviting me out to look at this," the inspector said. "It's a real pleasure." Poubelle nodded warmly and reached for a cigar. "I wanted to keep the FAA fully informed during the certification process." The inspector maintained his appreciative smile. "Well, of course, the FAA has nothing to do with certification." "Mmm?" "This is a space ship. Only NASA can certify it as spaceworthy." Poubelle nearly bit an inch off the cigar. "Whoa. Wait. It has wings. It flies through the atmosphere. It lands on a runway. It's first flight is being certified for an aircraft altitude record. It's an aircraft." The inspector spread his hands helplessly, the smile never fading. "It's rocket-powered. It goes into orbit. It's a spaceship." Poubelle's gaze narrowed. "NASA is in shambles. Nearly all upper management is dead. Having them certify this might take years. It might never happen!" The older man shrugged. "It's not my jurisdiction. We defer to NASA on anything designed to fly above fifty miles altitude." Poubelle yanked the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it at the inspector as if about to say something, then he paused. After a moment of thought, he calmly said, "So no jurisdiction means no oversight or interference?" "I'd have to approve the modifications made to your 747, but that's as far as I'd go." "Then let's have Hector take you to the other end of the airport and show you what's going on there. Cigar?" "Don't smoke. Can't accept gifts." After seeing the inspector off with a smile and a wave of his prosthetic, Poubelle frowned. He always thought he possessed enough wealth that he could push through whatever he needed to be aboveboard and legitimate. Yet there was no way to buy NASA approval in time to beat the deadline; they would stall, if only through the confusion created by a shattered chain of command. He wandered over to the flight simulator. Chemar was inside, practicing what she called "the pilot-out contingency." Poubelle preferred to call it "the Dead Larry scenario." "Chemar." "Oui?" "Brainstorm time." *** Joseph Lester scratched his head. "A TV show?" Poubelle and D'Asaro nodded simultaneously. They sat opposite the reporter in their office. The sound of the air conditioner drowned out the construction noise from within the hangar. "We've got to stir up greater public support for this project," Poubelle said. "You've got support. Don't you get a thousand letters a day? Fifty thousand dollars or more a week?" "That's a small fraction of the population, Joe." Chemar gazed at him with her stunning golden eyes. She knew it never failed to grab his attention. "We need to influence a major bloc of viewers. Cable or network, it doesn't matter." "How would you like to produce a ninety minute special on space disasters?" Poubelle asked. "Point the finger right at NASA? Lay out all the screwups, all the coverups, all the lies and betrayals?" Lester took a sip of soda and said, "Sounds depressing." Chemar raised her hands as if offering him a platter of steak. "End it with an upbeat tone. Fifteen minutes on Dædalus and Freespace. And anyone else who's working on alternatives." "I like that. Will anyone air it, though? NASA can come down hard on any--" Poubelle dismissed the comment with an imperious wave of his cigar. "Forget NASA. They're still reeling. The old boys' network is six feet under. You want to know who'll air it?" He spoke to his wrist. "Phone. Braverman." After a few moments, the call connected to the speaker phone. "Mr. Braverman's office." Lester raised an eyebrow. "Yolanda my girl! This is Larry Poubelle. Let me talk to Billy Boy, s'il vous plaît." He winked at Chemar, who shot back a patient smile. "One moment." "Larry?" William Braverman's voice was gruff but dignified, like that of an old lion content in his den. "Are you still in that California sand trap?" "I like zero humidity. I never sweat anymore. It sizzles off like spit on a skillet. Listen -- I've got a producer here who has the plumb line on a great concept for a news special. Squares off with NASA over Constitution and Challenger and so forth. No libel, just facts in the public record. Ought to enrage every widow's son. Can I count on your help?" "You've always leveled with me, Larry. Send it to me and I'll air it." The billionaires said their goodbyes and rung off. "See?" Poubelle said, pointing a finger at Lester. "Bang -- you're a producer for the Global Satellite Network." The lighter in his finger sprouted a flame. He blew it out with the flair of a gunslinger and grinned. "Your move, pilgrim." *** Lester used The Net to make their task simpler. Flying with Hillary through a vast landscape of film clips, he progressively narrowed their search until he located the high-def digital versions of what they needed. As for textual research, he already knew -- in the best tradition of reporting -- what he wanted to prove; the search consisted of finding material to bolster his argument. In the case of NASA and space disaster coverups, he encountered no paucity of data. The hardest task was actually to read it all. Ducks in an orderly row, Lester blazed through writing the narrative with an arcade-marksman's thoroughness. The toughest part turned out to be the segment dealing with Constitution. Though he knew the remnants of NASA management struggled madly, almost ludicrously, to turn the disaster from an indictment of the agency into an example of the tragedy that results from inadequate funding, not enough of the truth was yet known to reveal the enormity of their statements and actions. He would have to wing it with the old journalistic standby: "it remains to be seen..." At the end of a week, he called Poubelle to make a totally insane request: "I want Truman Collings to narrate this." The billionaire laughed. "The most pro-NASA reporter in the known Universe? The man who's covered every flight since Friendship Seven? And I thought I had lofty fantasies!" "He's been retired for years. I think he's seen what has become of the space program and has simply kept a gentleman's silence. This will give him a chance to say what he's probably wanted to for years." "We don't have time to sweet-talk an old curmudgeon such as Collings. I think we should go with that right wing motormouth Haste Purgatory. He's popu--" "Who's the producer here? Look, Larry, if you want this program to convince America to support you and come down on NASA, you've got the classic hard-case test in Collings. Convince him to narrate it and we can convince anyone." "Hand me the program and I'll hand you Collings." Using The Net's digital editing room, Lester and Hillary produced the test print of a 72-minute documentary with all the appropriate commercial breaks in eleven grueling days -- without resorting to anything higher on the speed spectrum than caffeine. 12 April He handed the optical disc pack to Poubelle in his office, saying, "Hail Cæsar! We are victorious." "Good God, Joe, you look as if Constitution rolled over you!" "Not funny, Larry. I've included some of the less disgusting photos of the crash site. It's been an unrelenting descent into death and duplicity to produce this." "I hope you gave it the cheerful ending we agreed upon." "Yeah," Lester said listlessly. "Really upbeat." "You'll be pleased to know that Truman Collings has agreed to view the work print. No guarantees." "When can he see it?" Poubelle slipped the disc pack into his office unit and summoned up the telecommunications utility. "Now. Chemar is in Waterbury charming him and setting up the modem. If he likes it, he says he can narrate it this week." "Great! All I'll need to bring is Hillary, the HD camera, a sound board and DAT, blue screen, three spots, and a mic. We can build the set on a virtual sound stage and--" "Here goes." Poubelle made the phone connection and started the playback of the documentary. As sure as Lester was of the persuasive quality of his work, he nonetheless endured the onset of a full-fledged anxiety attack. An hour and a quarter later, Lester was on another phone, booking his flight to Connecticut. Proceed to Chapter 28 Return to the Table of Contents