On the way back home, as the shadows lengthened and the traffic bunched on the choke points into London, I thought long and hard about the road ahead and where it was taking me. I knew absolutely nothing more about Marckus than I had gleaned from him before the meeting. The meeting had confirmed that he was a highly gifted academic with strong ties to the British government and its defense industry and that he was unquestionably up to his eyes in secret work. But that was all.
It didn't make me feel particularly comfortable. But then again, I'd already painted myself into a corner and this, at least, was a way forward. Doing nothing was not an option if I wanted to progress things.
Marckus had given me the names of two people I needed to see in the States. One was Garry Lyles at NASA; the other was Hal Puthoff.
In American defense procurement, there was a white world and a black world — one that was open to public scrutiny and one that was so firmly closed, from an outsider's perspective it was like it didn't exist.
The white world had know-how, a good sprinkling of imagination and not a little money at its disposal. The black world, on the other hand, had all of the above in spades. Lyles clearly worked in the white world. But with Puthoff, it was absolutely anyone's guess.
Chapter 9
A larger-than-life depiction of Wernher von Braun, whose self-assured good looks conjured up images of postwar Hollywood matinee idols, stared down at me from a mural in the gallery above the arrivals hall at Huntsville International Airport.
Von Braun is still revered in that remote corner of Alabama as the founding father of the nearby George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, the NASA "center of excellence" for space propulsion. Von Braun had died more than 20 years earlier, but American rocketry remained as a testament to the work of Operation Paperclip, the U.S. A.'s clandestine effort after World War Two to recruit Nazi V-2 specialists.
A complex of drab, rectangular buildings, "the Marshall Center Wernher von Braun administrative complex," erected at that time, stands as testimony to the decade in which the high ambient humidity routinely reverberated to test runs of engines for the Mercury-Redstone and Saturn V launch vehicles. The former took the first U.S. astronaut, Alan B. Shepard, briefly into space three weeks after Yuri Gagarin in May 1961; the latter formed the basis of the giant Apollo moon rocket.
Today, NASA Marshall scientists still work on the same basic technology that von Braun developed under the auspices of the Third Reich, even though chemical rockets, his great invention, are today regarded as too slow, too unreliable, too expensive and too inefficient.
It was mid-summer, four months after my meeting with Marckus, before I was able to wangle a trip to Marshall and do as he'd suggested.
Set in a vast area of grasslands, bordered by well-tended, lush forestation, Marshall was melting under the high heat when I eased my rental car up the long approach road that peeled off the interstate to the hub of the Center itself. As I got out of the car, a military Huey thudded low overhead, disappearing behind the trees in the direction of the Redstone Arsenal, the Army's neighboring missile test facility. As the low-frequency throb of the blades faded from earshot, it was replaced by the gentle swish of grass sprinklers and the chatter of cicadas. I was met at the entrance of the main building of the complex by a woman from public affairs. As we moved through the lobby, she sketched in some of the background to the program I'd come to talk about with its manager, Garry Lyles.
Under the Advanced Space Transportation Program, ASTP, officials at NASA Marshall have been working since the mid-1990s on methods to reduce the cost of space access. Using today's generation of launch vehicles — the Space Shuttle Orbiter, the Delta and Atlas rockets — it costs around $10,000 per pound to put a satellite into low Earth orbit. One short-term payoff of ASTP will be the development of a family of reusable rocket planes that should cut these costs by a factor of ten by the end of the present decade. A mid-term goal, due to yield results in around 2015, is to develop a hybrid "combined cycle" engine— half-rocket, half-jet engine — that will reduce launch costs by a factor of a hundred. Even though the hybrid engine, if it can be mastered technologically, will give NASA space access for as little as $100 per pound, it will never lead to anything other than a delivery system to low Earth orbit.
For missions beyond Earth, scientists will either have to rely on improvements to the chemical rocket or on something radically different.
For a mission to the planets of the inner solar system a nuclear rocket could be developed in a relatively compressed timescale to cut round-trip journey times from Earth to Mars from many months to possibly just weeks. The feasibility of nuclear rockets had been proven in two NASAdeveloped solid core fission reactor test programs, NERVA and ROVER, between 1959 and 1972. These never came to fruition, my PR guide told me, due to concerns over safety and also because emerging and more advanced nuclear fusion technology was seen as yielding three times the efficiencies. Like the fission rockets, however, fusion systems never happened either — not in the white world, anyhow. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon was reported to be working on a classified nuclear thermal rocket under the code name "Timberwind," but soon afterward it was canceled. Since the black world is publicly unaccountable, it is impossible to know whether this really was the case.
Lightweight nuclear fusion propulsion is one methodology being studied for a manned NASA mission to Mars, my guide continued as we drifted toward the elevators, alongside "light-sails," "magnetic sails," "antimatter fusion drives," lasers and other exotic-sounding technologies.
While the physics behind these ideas is generally well understood, she added, the challenge in turning them into hardware is enormous.
But ASTP did not end there. In addition to examining ways to provide cheaper access to low Earth orbit and coming up with propulsion systems that by the second half of the century will lead to "the commercialization of the inner solar system," its original task went a lot further.
Into an elevator, half a dozen floors up, and we emerged into a world of bright walls, carpeted floors, posters of exotic spacecraft and artists' impressions of planetary systems, constellations and nebulae.
Up ahead, through an open door, sitting behind a large desk, Garry Lyles — bespectacled, bearded and thoughtful-looking — was waiting.
"Within a hundred years," he told me over coffee, his soft southern drawl catching with emotion, "we'll be going to the next star system."
He spoke about the journey with such absolute conviction that it was difficult, in spite of the sheer fantasy at the heart of the idea, not to believe him. Lyles was a dreamer, but his dreams were rooted in work that was going on within the Wernher von Braun administrative complex as we spoke. ASTP scientists at Huntsville — people working right on the edge of what was known and understood in the harsh world of propulsion physics — were collaborating with other NASA facilities on science that would enable astronauts to make a "fast trip" to the Alpha Centauri star system, Earth's nearest stellar neighbor, 4.3 light-years away. As head of this portion of ASTP, Lyles was bound up in the immensity of the challenge. I asked what he meant by a "fast trip." "We have set a goal to go to Alpha Centauri in 50 years — a 50-year trip." He stared at me intently as he rocked back in his chair. "You have to really use your imagination to come up with a propulsion system that will do that." "When will you be able to make that trip?" I asked. He gestured to another part of the complex visible beyond the blinds of his window. "We have a group of thinkers out there that's beyond antimatter. They're looking at space warp, ways to get to other stars in a Star Trek-like fashion. If we're not thinking about that kind ofthing today, we won't be going to the stars in a hundred years' time. But I have to tell you that if you talk to these people, these engineers who are working on interstellar missions, they think they can do it. And I have no doubt that they're right."