“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.
“Now, facing lobbies like that, with institutional rivalries going back a half century, I sure as hell am not prepared to go into bat for any kind of shit-headed NASA insider stuff about how everything is fine and dandy, just another technical glitch we can get over with a little work. Did you know that the NASA management recommended just continuing with the Shuttle launch schedule in the immediate wake of Challenger? They had to be forced to take a hiatus while they figured out and fixed the problems. You will not find this Administrator making the same mistake.”
“I’ll tell you how we can minimize risk,” Benacerraf said hotly. “We just won’t fly. Jake, we’re flying experimental aircraft, here. You just can’t expect the public to see it this way. We’re the professionals. We understand the risks, and we accept them. That’s why there are no Challenger tombstones and memorials and plaques all over JSC. Jake, you have to have a little taste. You can’t keep looking back at some disaster, all the time. We have to move on. We’re looking at the future of humanity here, the expansion of the human race into—”
Hadamard waved her silent. “Let’s save the speeches, Paula. Besides, I think you are too smart to believe it. The truth is we are never going to move out into deep space. There’s nowhere to go. The Moon’s dead, Venus is an inferno, Mars is almost as dead as the Moon. And even if there was a worthwhile destination the journey would kill us. We’re not going anywhere, not in our lifetimes, probably not ever. It was always just a dream. People understand that, instinctively, in a way they never did in the 1960s, during Apollo. That’s why, I fear, they’re sick of spaceflight — Shuttle, the Station — and sick of the people who promote it.”
His words, though mildly expressed, seemed brutally hard. Benacerraf shivered, suddenly, despite the continuing warmth of the day. My God, she thought. He’s going to let it go. Is that what he’s brought me here to tell me?
Here in this nondescript wood, beside this slightly tacky memorial, she could be witnessing the death of the U.S. manned space program.
They turned and began to walk out of the wood, back towards the car.
“Why did you ask to see me, today? What do you want of me?”
“We’re going to be hit hard by Congress and the White House and the DoD over Columbia, Paula. Whatever I decide, I might not survive myself. And even if I do I’m going to have to shake up many levels of the management hierarchy, in all the centers. I’m trying to think ahead.
“I know I’m going to need someone to take over the Shuttle program. A fresh face. A management outsider, Paula, someone who’s untainted by all the NASA crap.”
She frowned. “You mean me?”
“You’ve the right qualifications, the right experience. I’ve watched how you’ve handled yourself in the fall-out from Columbia, and I’ve been impressed. And you have the right air of distance from the real insiders.”
She said, “My God. You’re asking me to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle program.”
“Mothballing, Paula. That’s the language we’ll use. Look, it’s an important job.”
“To you?”
He grinned. “Hell, yes, to me. What did you think I meant?”
“But what about all the other programs? The stuff you started after Chinese-Sputnik panic, the RLV initiatives…”
“Frankly,” Hadamard said, “I don’t much care. If some damn Shuttle II ever flies, it will be long after I’m out of the hot seat. And if it ever does fly you know Maclachlan will just shut it down, when he takes the White House. All that matters to me is how to use up the Shuttle technology. That project, unlike RLV, will come to fruition during my term.”
Benacerraf got it. It could be that a judicious, sensitively handled wind-down of Shuttle would be the criterion on which Hadamard would be judged: on which the rest of his career might depend.
“Sure. So what about the components? What do we do with the three remaining orbiters?”
“You’ve heard some of the suggestions. You’ll hear more. The dreamers at Marshall want to respond to the Chinese, to go to the Moon. As ever. The USAF want nuclear space battle stations, or to practise sub-orbital bomb runs over Moscow. The Navy want to use the birds as target practice. And so on.”
“Do you have a preference?”