“Yes, sir, JK.”
The weight problem was more difficult to crack.
Every design definition Lee had ever worked on was the same; each subsystem inevitably grew in scope and complexity as the engineers got into the detail. So Lee started to keep a list of best-guess weights for all the various components and subsystems.
Every morning Lee would call his senior people into his own office, into a progress meeting he called a hot griddle. It was something he knew they used at the Strategic Air Command. Seven-forty-five smart and then the doors were locked; the chairs were pushed against the wall, and there was no coffee, so you couldn’t sit down and take it easy. Then, everybody would talk through their top problem for the day and how they would resolve it.
At the griddle sessions Lee handed out weight summaries, showing how far the current aggregate design was over the limit. He was reluctant to start setting weight limits for subsystems — he wanted to find the best trade-off across the whole spacecraft — but he pushed his people every day to figure out what they could do to bring down their net weight, to give the rest a little slack.
Still, the daily totals weren’t coming down fast enough, and the weight issue soon emerged as his major worry.
It wouldn’t matter if, at submission time, they were a little heavy, a little above the target. If they won, there would be plenty of detailed design work to follow. But just then it seemed as if the Columbia MEM wouldn’t even be in the right ballpark.
The weight limits had been set by NASA to fit into their new all-chemical, gravity-assist system configuration. And the limits were thereby much tighter than they had been in previous nuclear-option baselines.
Lee started to worry, privately, that they might be too tight to be feasible.
The issue was brought to a head, at last, by Lee’s closest ally.
Jack Morgan took Lee into a corner of the office, away from the hubbub. Morgan’s face was long, uncharacteristically serious. “JK, I think we’re in trouble.”
Morgan took Lee through the figures he had been establishing for the MEM environment and life-support systems. He had guideline figures, based on Apollo, for what it would take to support one human being for one day on Mars: food, clothing, air supply, waste disposal, living space, EVA consumables.
“Look at this. And this.” Morgan took Lee through a whole series of options, where he had tried to juggle elements of his ECLSS weight budget against each other. “There’s no way I can support four men for thirty days on the surface. That’s one hundred and twenty man-days. It just doesn’t fit. We’re an order of magnitude out, here.”
Lee felt a bubble of panic swell up in his throat. It really looked as if they weren’t going to be able to close the design.
Suddenly he was aware of the lack of sleep, all the meals he’d skipped, the adrenaline he’d been burning off; he felt ill, light-headed.
Come on, JK. Get a grip on yourself. If it’s a problem for you, so it is for Rockwell, and McDonnell, and all those other assholes. Look for a way to turn this to our advantage.
Morgan was looking at him with concern. “Are you okay, JK? You look kind of—”
“Don’t turn into a doctor on me now, Jack.”
“Buddy, the way you eat yourself up, you’re going to need a doctor someday. I mean it, JK.”
Lee railroaded on. “Listen, Jack. You can’t deliver a hundred and twenty man-days on Mars. Fine. What can you give me?”
Morgan thought about it. “Maybe 75 percent of that. Say ninety days.”
Shit. Worse than I thought. “So we have our four guys down there for, what, twenty-three days?”
“You’ve just lost a quarter of your surface stay time, JK. I can’t believe that’s going to be acceptable.”
Lee shook his head. “No, it isn’t. But there has to be another way.” He thought about it. “Ninety man-days, huh. Well, what if we only take three guys? Then we can still stay the full thirty.”
Morgan shook his head immediately. “That’s impossible. The RFP sets it out. Having spent all that money to get their guys onto Mars, NASA wants to get twenty-four-hour EVA cycles going. They want two guys out on the Martian surface for as much of each day as possible. They want a ‘red’ and ‘blue’ team shift system—”
“Well, the ‘red’ team can take a flying fuck at the ‘blue’ team,” Lee snapped back. “This won’t be the only place where that shitty RFP is wrong.”
His mind was starting to race.
Three guys instead of four. If it could be done, he started to figure, there would be add-on savings throughout the rest of the program, beyond the MEM definition itself. For example, one quarter less life support would have to be hauled all the way out to Mars and back. And all at no, or minimal, cost to the value of the surface activities.
That’s what he would have to demonstrate, anyhow.
If he could achieve this, he realized with growing excitement, it would be a hell of a strong plank in the bid.
All Lee’s brief feelings of panic were gone; he felt strong, fit, eager, pumping with adrenaline again. He grabbed Morgan’s arm. “So all we have to do is figure out some way of getting three guys to maintain a twenty-four hour EVA shift pattern. Listen, Jack. This is what I want you to do.”
It was hardly a simulator: just a room within a room, fenced off from one of the Columbia site’s larger lab areas. They fitted it out with a rudimentary life-support system — food and water — but the room was left open to the outside air.
Morgan paid three students from a paramedic class he taught at Caltech to come and live in there for a month.
Every day the students went through a mocked-up EVA: they put on dummy space suits and backpacks loaded with lead weights, and they moved about simulating Mars surface experiments. And then the students would climb up a little ladder to simulate returning to the MEM, and vacuum each other clean of talcum-powder Mars dust.
The students experimented with work and sleep patterns, trying to find ways to optimize their surface shifts.
The whole setup was crude, but effective; at the end of the month the students were a little bored, and definitely exhausted; but they were alert, functional, and actually fitter than when they had gone into the mock-up. Exhaustion was fine, anyhow; the real crew was going to have the whole return leg of the trip, seven months of it, to sleep it off.
Morgan wrote this up for Lee, and Lee was delighted with the results. Not only was his three-man idea going to hit that evaluation board between the eyes, he was going to be able to throw at them detailed proposals about managing the Mars surface time: suggestions for shift rotas, the need to establish work and sleep patterns before arrival at Mars, how to schedule suitable rest periods, and all the rest.
Problems and opportunities. He had a mood of gathering momentum, of approaching triumph.
As the clock wound down to the deadline day, Lee started sitting in on the rehearsals as each group put together its own piece of the pitch.
He began to figure out how the final thing would come together. There would be him — and Xu, Rowen, Lye, Morgan, and a few others — on a stage in some kind of hotel or convention center, in front of a mass of NASA engineers, and they would have sixty minutes to make their case.
But the more he listened to the draft pieces of the pitch, the more he understood that it wasn’t going to make sense to have five or six or seven presenters in that time. One man was going to have to do the whole show, from beginning to end, on every aspect of the proposal, every damned subsystem, with the others sitting there in support to help field questions.