A small group of tourists, evidently bussed over from the visitors’ center, Space Center Houston, hung about in front of the Redstone. They wore shorts and baseball caps, and their bare skin was coated with image-tattoos, and they looked up at the Redstone with baffled incomprehension.
But then, Benacerraf thought, it was already more than four decades since Alan Shepard’s first sub-orbital lob in a tin can like this. Two generations. No wonder these young bedecked visitors looked on these crude Cold War relics with bemusement.
Hadamard pulled out onto NASA Road One, and headed west. As he drove he sat upright, his grey-blond hair close-cropped, his hands resting confidently on the wheel as the car’s internal processor took them smoothly through the traffic.
They cut south down West NASA Boulevard, and pulled off the road and into a park. Hadamard drove into a parking area. The lot was empty save for a big yellow school bus.
“Let’s walk,” Hadamard said.
They got out of the car.
The park was wide, flat, tree-lined, green. The air was still, silent, save for the sharp-edged rustle of crickets, and the distant voices of a bunch of children, presumably decanted from the bus. Benacerraf could see the kids in the middle distance, running back and forth, some kind of sports day.
Hadamard, wearing neat dark sunglasses and a NASA baseball cap, led the way across the field.
Benacerraf took a big breath of air, and swung her arms around in the empty space.
Hadamard grinned at her, and his shades cast dazzling highlights. “Feels like coming home, huh.”
“You bet.” She thought about it. “You know, I don’t think I’ve walked on grass, except for taking short cuts across the JSC campus, since I got back from orbit.”
“You should get out more.” He scuffed at the grass with his patent leather shoes. “This is where we belong, after all. Here, on Earth, where we’ve spent four billion years adapting to the weather.”
“So you don’t think we ought to be travelling in space.”
He shrugged, and patted at his belly. “Not in this kind of design. A big heavy bag of water. Spacecraft are mostly plumbing, after all… Humans don’t belong up there.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Well, they don’t. You should hear what the scientists say to me. Every time someone sneezes on Station, a microgravity protein growth experiment is wrecked.”
Benacerraf said, “You’re repeating the criticisms that are coming out in the Commission hearings. You know, it’s like 1967 over again, after the Apollo fire.”
“Yes, but back then they managed to restrict the inquiries afterward to a NASA internal investigation. And that meant they could keep most of the recommendations technical rather than managerial.”
Benacerraf grunted. “Neat trick.”
Hadamard laughed. “Well, the Administrator back then was a wily old fox who knew how to play those guys up on the Hill. But I’m no Jim Webb. After Challenger we had a Presidential Commission, just like the one that we’re facing now.”
They reached the woods, and the seagull-like cries of the children receded.
Eventually they came to a glade. A monument stood on a little square of bark-covered ground, enclosed by the trees, and the dappled sunlight reflected from its upper surface. It was box-like, waist high, and constructed of some kind of black granite.
It was peaceful here. She wondered what the hell Hadamard wanted.
Jake Hadamard took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and looked at Benacerraf. “Paula, do you know where you are? When I first came to work at NASA, I was struck by the—” he hesitated “—the invisibility of the Challenger incident. I mean, there are plenty of monuments around JSC to the great triumphs of the past, like Apollo 11. Pictures on the walls, the flight directors’ retirement plaques, Mission Control in Building 30 restored 1960s style as a national monument, for God’s sake.
“But Challenger might never have happened.
“It’s the same if you go around the Visitors’ Center. You have your Lego exhibits and your Station displays and your pig-iron toy Shuttles in the playground, and that inspirational music playing on a tape loop all the time. But again, Challenger might never have happened.
“Outside NASA, it’s different. For the rest of us, Challenger was one of the defining moments of the 1980s. The moment when a dream died.”
He said us. Benacerraf found the word startling; she studied Hadamard with new interest.
He said, “Look around Houston and Clear Lake. You have Challenger malls and car lots and drug stores… And look at this monument.”
Benacerraf bent to see. The monument’s white lettering had weathered badly, but she could still make out the Harris County shield inset on the front, and, on the top, the mission patch for Challenger’s final flight: against a Stars-and-Stripes background, the doomed orbiter flying around Earth, with those seven too-familiar names around the rim: McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Scobee, Smith, Jarvis, McAuliffe.
“We’re in the Challenger Seven Memorial Park,” Hadamard said. “You see, what’s interesting to me is that this little monument wasn’t raised by NASA, but by the local people.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at, Jake.”
“I’m trying to understand how, over two decades, these NASA people have come to terms with the Challenger thing. Because I need to learn how to size up the recommendations I’m getting from you for the way forward after Columbia.”
Benacerraf said, “You want to know if you can trust us.”
He didn’t smile.
“NASA people didn’t launch that Chinese girl into orbit,” she said. “And that’s the source of the pressure on you to come up with some way to keep flying.”
“Is it?”
Benacerraf decided to probe. “You know, now that I’m getting to know you, you aren’t what I expected.”
He smiled. “Not just a bean counter, a politico on the make? Paula, I am both of those things. I’m not going to deny it, and I’m not ashamed of either of them. We need politicos and bean counters to make our world go round. But—”
“What?”
“I wasn’t born an accountant. I was seventeen when Apollo 11 landed. I painted my room black with stars, and had a big Moon map on the ceiling—”
“You?”
“Sure.”
“And you’re the NASA Administrator.”
He shrugged. “I’m the Administrator who was on watch when Columbia turned into a footprint on that salt lake.
“I’m going through hell, frankly, facing that White House Commission. Phil Gamble is getting the whipping in the media, but the Commission are just beating up on me. And then there’s the pressure from the Air Force. You know, over the years the Air Force has made some big mistakes chasing manned spaceflight. They wasted a lot of money on projects that didn’t come to fruition: the X-20 spaceplane, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory… In the 1970s they were pushed into relying on the Shuttle as their sole launch vehicle. That single space policy mistake cost them twenty billion dollars, they tell me, in today’s money. And now we got Columbia, and the fleet is grounded again. You can bet that if Shuttle never flies again, there will be plenty in USAF who won’t shed a tear.