He had too much time to think.
He kept on going over the events of that flight — in fact, over everything he’d done in all the years that had led up to Apollo-N.
Was there anything he should have done differently during the flight, anything he’d missed that might have saved Jones, Priest, and Dana? And during the long development, how far was he responsible for the shoddiness, the carelessness which had finally destroyed the nuclear rocket?
He didn’t come up with any answers. He could, in retrospect, think of a thousand things he might have done differently. But he wasn’t wallowing; he knew that anything is possible with the benefit of hindsight. He’d done the best he could, at every stage of his career.
But it was no comfort. It happened on my watch.
In the hall of his rented apartment he had hung a small brass-framed photograph. It showed three space-suited astronauts. To Bert — In Your Hands.
Seger didn’t go in or out of his apartment without looking at that photo and reading the inscription.
He found a run-down little Catholic church, tucked away just a few blocks from Headquarters, and took to spending time in there. He attended Mass three or four times a week. The ancient, gentle ritual took him back to his childhood and comforted him.
He was struck — shocked, even — by the poverty he saw around him in the neighborhood of the church, just blocks away from NASA Headquarters, here in the capital city of the richest nation on the planet.
He began to see that he’d been locked away inside NASA for too long, pursuing the organization’s single goal, the Mars landing, with blinkered obsessiveness. Perhaps they all had.
He remembered how shocked he’d been by the intrusion of those antinuke protesters at the Cape.
The world out here, beyond JSC, had continued to evolve, and Seger felt as if he was emerging into a new, harsh light, his NASA cocoon crumbling around him.
He went to the libraries and started going through back issues of newspapers — papers he’d barely scanned when they were printed, save for sports results and NASA coverage. Then, as he stared into grainy microfiche screens, he felt as if he was learning about some phase of ancient history. But this was the world in which he had lived, the story of the country which supported him.
The United States was falling apart, it seemed to Seger.
The country was deep in recession. Under Reagan, there was a kind of cheerful, simplistic optimism around. But the divisions in society seemed to Seger to be growing wider than ever. Two Americas were emerging: there was a grotesque, materialistic money-chase among the already affluent, and among the poor — particularly the nonwhites, in the inner cities — there was a tailspin of drugs, crime, decaying housing projects, and a failing educational system.
And meanwhile, Seger learned, in the middle of the recession, Reagan was vastly increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Nuclear weapons were a key part of that buildup. Next year, cruise missiles would be deployed in Western Europe, in the face of much protest from those countries. There’d been more protest at home, too, he read.
People were growing scared again. A DoD official had talked about how backyard shelters would save them all, when the bomb dropped. If there are enough shovels going around, everybody’s going to make it.
Seger read back as far as Three Mile Island. The similarities — administrative and technical — between that disaster and the Apollo-N incident chilled him.
The general press coverage of NASA, once he looked on that with his new perspective, startled him, too. He saw skepticism, anger, contempt, resentment, on the part of the people outside looking in. He remembered how Eisenhower had cautioned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex — against an expanded space program, in fact — because technocracy was foreign to the individualistic American spirit, and grafting it onto the nation was going to do a lot of harm. Well, Kennedy had accepted that risk. And it seemed to Seger that the country was paying the price.
The space program, he saw now, was a prime symptom of all this. What use was any of it? The much-lauded spin-offs were minimal and probably would have come about anyhow, if the need was there. NASA’s continuing obsession with manned flight had distorted the whole organization, the direction of other programs. Space initiatives which might have done some good down on Earth — science projects, Earth resources studies — had all been subordinated to the operational needs of the manned missions. An unmanned mission wouldn’t even be approved if it didn’t support the manned effort more or less directly — or worse, if it indicated that humans might not be necessary in space…
NASA had lobbied to go to Mars, he began to see, in order to justify itself, to keep its huge teams together, after the great lunar effort wound down.
Of course, releasing NASA’s funds to other, Earthbound projects would have been a token gesture. The money would have seeped away, Seger was sure, with no tangible benefit. But that wasn’t the point. The space program was like a huge, spindly, etiolated plant, pushing all its energy obsessively into one sickly Mars red bloom, while the society in which its roots were anchored was steadily disintegrating.
It just wasn’t appropriate. Any more than had been the overambitious civilian nuclear program, the weapons buildup…
To Seger, the Mars mission came to seem almost blasphemous.
A new clarity entered his thoughts as he shaped these ideas. A new determination.
Of course he knew that he was still reacting to Apollo-N. His thoughts would be structured by that defining incident for the rest of his life. Perhaps, in fact, he was still in some mild form of shock. It didn’t matter. Truth remained truth, no matter what the form of the revelation, and he felt he was on his own road to Damascus, seeing the space program from the outside, in its true perspective, for the first time in his working life.
He found great comfort in his new perception.
The next time he attended Mass, he asked the priest if he could give a sermon. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 313/11:33:22
313/11:33:22 CDR …For my part, I want to use the opportunity of this telecast to register our awareness of the debt we owe to all those who came before us. This flight has come out of the efforts, first, of people from history, of scientists across the world, who have brought us to the point where we can meet the challenge even of a deep space trek like this across the Solar System. Next, the American people, who have expressed their will to see this great exploration adventure continue. Next, four administrations and their Congresses for having the courage to implement that will. After the Moon landings I think it’s true to say that America came close to turning its back on spaceflight, and it took political courage and vision to bring us to where we are, today. And then we come to the Agency and industry teams that built the spacecraft: the Saturn boosters, the Mission Module, the Apollo, and the MEM. This trip of ours to Mars may look to you simple or easy. I’d like to assure you that that has not been the case. The Saturn VB booster system which put us into orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked perfectly. This switch which I have in my hand now, if you can see that, has over three hundred counterparts in this control rack alone, and there are many more in the Command Module and the MEM. In addition to that, there are myriads of circuit breakers, levers, rods, and other associated controls. The MS-II, the big rocket stage on the back end of our Ares cluster, has performed flawlessly so far; and it must do so again, or we cannot return to the Earth… We have always had confidence that all this equipment will work and work properly, and we continue to have confidence that it will do so for the remainder of this flight. All this is possible only through the endeavors of a number of people. First, the American men and women who put these pieces of machinery together at the factory. Second, the test teams, with their painstaking work during the assembly and retest after assembly. Third, the astronauts who flew before us to assemble the Ares components in Earth orbit. Finally, the people at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, in management, in mission planning and flight control, and in crew training. This operation is somewhat like a TV news show; all you see on screen is the three of us, but behind the scenery are thousands of others — hundreds of thousands. And every damn one of them did his or her job to the utmost.