Muldoon looked around the room, taking in all of the delegates. “You know the situation we’re in, folks; the budget deficit is running so high this year that every discretionary program — including Ares — is under pressure, all the time, every budget round. Now, you may say that isn’t fair — that our mistakes get magnified out of proportion, while the much bigger foul-ups of other agencies are hidden — but we’re a high-profile agency; you have to accept it as a fact of our lives. So, we have to be squeaky clean. We’ll take questions at the close, folks; I want to move this along now…”
Udet, still standing, did not trust himself to speak. Compromises. You talk of compromises. We were compromised from the beginning. Our Saturn VB fuding from the start has been half the projections we requested. Half! Without compromises you would not be flying into space now. And yet you bleat about the consequences, about the loss of a single launcher!
He felt he could bear no more of this. He clambered past the people beside him, apologizing, and reached the aisle. He stalked toward the back of the room.
Dear God. Are we really reduced to such finger-pointing inanity? All I ask — all I have ever asked — is that you give me adequate tools, and I will finish the job. Achieve the dream. Even with half the resources, I will find you solutions! But what I will not — cannot — achieve is a miracle, I cannot guarantee you perfect safety and reliability. When will you people understand that?
It seemed a long way to the door Nobody was prepared to meet his eyes.
Dana’s patient presence at the podium, unseen, was like a wound in Udet’s side.
Saturday, June 5, 1982
It all came to a head.
It was their wedding anniversary, for God’s sake. And although JK had flowers for her, and a card, and a kiss on the cheek in the morning, Jennine knew from long experience that it was his secretary, Bella, who scheduled such events in his diary and would buy the card and whatever. There was no thought from JK at all.
This evening they were supposed to be going out for dinner. They did that together maybe twice a year. But JK didn’t come home. That wasn’t so unusual. When Jennine phoned his office, she got Bella, who politely told her he wasn’t at the Columbia site. That was code for: he’s out with the guys.
And so it proved. JK came rolling in, after eleven, as oiled as you like, parking his T-bird at a crazy angle in the driveway.
“You shouldn’t drive like that,” Jennine said. She hated the querulous tone that came into her voice at such moments.
“Oh, God, the dinner. Honey, I’m sorry,” JK said. “I clean forgot. We’ll do it tomorrow. Okay?”
No, you idiot. It’s not okay. And right now, I have the feeling that it never was.
She went to bed.
After an hour or so he joined her. He touched her face, tenderly, and ran his hand down her nightgown, until he had cupped her breast.
She turned away. She was much too tense, too upset. And anyhow she could smell the stale rum on his breath, oozing out of his pores.
But at least he was home. At that thought she softened, as she drifted toward sleep. At least he’s come home. Maybe in the morning, I might be able to persuade him not to go in quite so early for once.
Before she fell asleep, the phone rang. JK picked it up immediately. “Lee.”
She had followed the development of Columbia’s MEM program. Actually, since JK brought work home most nights, and since he routinely held business meetings at their home — and always without any warning — she could hardly help but follow the program.
Once, JK took her out to Boston, where the Avco company were manufacturing the MEM’s ablative heat shield. It was a fascinating place. The ablative stuff was an epoxy resin, something the Avco engineers called “Avcoat 5026-39.” To hold this in place, the engineers constructed a titanium honeycomb, which would be bonded to the capsule’s lower surface, and they pumped the epoxy into each individual cell with a caulking gun. It had to be done by hand; the engineers worked their way across the surface until they had filled in all two hundred thousand cavities. If an X-ray inspection revealed a bubble, that cell would be cleaned out with a dentist’s drill and refilled.
Jennine watched this through a glass picture window. It was a startlingly medieval scene, this slow and painstaking handcrafting. And she wondered how it must feel to work on something — to touch and shape it with your fingertips — knowing that it might, one day, enter the air of Mars.
Avco’s testing process would start with handheld blowtorches, and finish up with rocket-propelled power dives into the Earth’s atmosphere…
But such occasions, when JK took the trouble to share his work with her, were the exception, not the rule. Mostly she had to endure his absences, silently hostess his business meetings.
Jennine had married JK back in 1955.
At the time he had been working for a master’s in aeronautical engineering at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, out in Pasadena.
They got married in a Catholic church close to Jennine’s parents’ home in New Orleans. She had been starting to make her way as a secretary in a large law practice in the city. But she gave it all up to go with JK, to support him and his career a thousand miles away. That was what you did in 1955.
Jennine’s parents gave them money to rent a car for a couple of weeks, and so they drove back east, through Vermont, to watch the fall coloring the leaves. Whenever the fall came she thought of that honeymoon.
After the honeymoon they flew west, and JK drove her out to Pasadena, to the little house he’d rented.
When they arrived, there was a group of JK’s pals waiting there. She thought it must be some kind of welcome home party. But no; it turned out there was a problem in the Caltech wind tunnel.
So JK had kissed her and gone off to the lab, leaving her standing in the driveway with all her luggage. JK didn’t get home until dawn.
As it turned out, that honeymoon in Vermont, twenty-seven years ago, had been the last holiday Jennine and JK had taken together.
And this damn Mars program was the toughest project JK had ever worked on. JK was at heart a technician, and a hands-on manager, at his best — so Jennine thought — when working with comparatively small teams, at one site. But now he was running a national effort, one of the most complex engineering projects ever undertaken.
Even beyond the complexity of what was going on at Columbia itself there were all the subcontractors Columbia had to deal with: Honeywell working on stabilization and control (not Hughes, JK would point out with relish), Garrett Corporation on the cabin environment, Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Rockwell, providing the main propulsion systems, Pratt and Whitney developing the fuel cells, and so on.
JK wanted to avoid the thousands of uncoordinated changes that had pretty much paralyzed Rockwell’s development of Apollo for a while in the 1960s. So he had instigated a change control mechanism. And that had brought him endless conflict with the astronauts — including Joe Muldoon — who, in the Apollo days, had gotten used to ruling the roost.
And on it went.
Once, JK showed her a PERT chart for the MEM development, a project plan with all the tasks linked together in their logical order. It was just a mass of computer printouts, little boxes, and spidery connecting arrows.
“What do you do with all this?”
JK laughed and tipped the plan toward a waste bin. “Nothing! Haven’t got time to read it!”
The project was a monster, and JK was trying to wrestle it to the ground.