When he got to work the plant was in chaos. It was worse than he had expected, with NASA people still crawling all over the goddamn place, and Art Cane bouncing off the walls of his office, convinced he was going to lose the MEM contract.
So Lee tried to get a hold of his program again.
First he kicked out all the outsiders, the NASA people and the rest, whom he regarded as not strictly necessary for the progress of the MEM. It took him a day just to do that, and he had a lot of opposition from the NASA bigwigs, of course, but he did it anyhow.
Still, it worried him a little that Art Cane’s backing in this was muted.
Then he spent a couple of days working through the two audit reports, and blue-penciling the politics and the waffle and the ill-informed and the downright goddamn stupid. And there was a hell of a lot of that.
The auditors, both internal and external, had gone for what he considered to be easy meat: schedule delays and paperwork snarl-ups and procedural problems. To Lee, schedules on paper were all very well — you had to produce them for senior management, and they were always the best guess you could make, and you had to keep a weather eye on them — but the fact was, half the time Columbia didn’t know what they were trying to build here, or what the latest batch of test results would throw at them, or what the latest flood of changes from the design teams at Marshall, Houston, and elsewhere would bring. In a program like the MEM you couldn’t expect actually to stick to a schedule. The delays certainly weren’t a question of his people’s competence, as far as Lee was concerned; they were more a measure of the inherent complexity of what they were trying to do.
Columbia was building a spacecraft, for God’s sake; and you only had to walk through the Clean Room, to see the four beautiful test articles emerging, to understand that basically, at the heart of all the paper storms, JK Lee was succeeding.
He tried to distill the reports down to what he considered to be the elements of common sense, of valid criticism, and then act on them. For instance the auditors had found poor demarcation of work areas, and sloppy handling of materials, and so forth. Well, he wasn’t going to argue about that kind of thing. Lee fired off memos, and called in people to chew ass, and demanded some fixing.
After a few days of this he went to see Art Cane, and he was able to throw the two fat audit reports across the desk at Art. Every paragraph of each report had been blue-penciled by Lee, either as completed, with a fat tick, or as irrelevant bullshit, in which case he’d just scribbled it out.
Cane leafed through the stuff, looking a little dubious; but he accepted what Lee had given him, and told him to write up his responses to the reports formally.
Next, Lee got everyone at the plant involved in the MEM program — there was almost a thousand of them — to come squeezing into the big, roomy old canteen. The room was still used as the main conference room, and its walls were lined with multicolored schedule boards and progress charts. Lee got a photograph of their prime MEM, Spacecraft 009, blown up so it covered the wall behind him — the great complex silver pyramid made a beautiful image — and he stood on a table in front of his people. He put his hands on his hips, and glared out at the sea of pinched-up, worried faces around him.
“Now, I know times have been tough for you guys. I know you’ve got a lot of people crawling all over you saying you don’t know your butts from third base. And we did get some things wrong. But now we’re fixing them, and that’s healthy. And I know, deep down — and you know — that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way we’re working here. And I know there’s nothing wrong with the spacecraft, either. If NASA wants to fly in April” — the target date for the D-prime mission, the first manned flight — “then we’ll be ready for them.
“I want you to forget about everything else, now, except that first flight. We’re going to focus on this one spacecraft here, and make it work; because if we can complete that flight well, believe me, all the rest of the program is going to slot into place, bang bang bang, just like that.
“And I know one thing more.” He looked around at their faces, all somehow smoothed out by the way they were tilted up at him, made to look younger; he felt a surge of protectiveness. “One thing more. I know I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. Now, let’s get back to work, and let’s make history.”
Well, this was a standard spiel for Lee, a version of a talk he’d used at tough times on many projects. A standard-issue motivator. On the B-70, it had even gotten him a cheer.
But this time, although there were a lot of nodding heads, nobody cheered; and when he was done, they just turned away, and drifted back to their workstations.
He got down off the rickety table with a hand from Jack Morgan. He had a sick feeling, deep in the pit of his stomach. He felt isolated, somehow vulnerable.
Maybe it was his heart, letting him down again.
The hell with it. Leaning a little on Jack Morgan, he started prowling around the plant, trying to pinpoint problems, bawling out technicians, riding herd on his program managers as hard as he could.
Tuesday, November 8, 1983
Joe Muldoon wasn’t a happy man.
He had a decision to make, and today was the day he had to make it.
He had the three names of his prime Ares crew — the Commander, the Mission Specialist, and the Mars Excursion Module Pilot — written out on a piece of paper on his desk.
CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Curval.
Less than eighteen months before Ares was supposed to leave the ground, the heat was on NASA over its crew selection — which still hadn’t been announced to the public — and NASA, in turn, was turning up the heat on Joe Muldoon, who was responsible for that selection.
The scientific community was going ape-shit about the fact that all three astronauts on the prime Mars crew were from the military. Adam Bleeker — while he was doing fine in the freshman-standard geology classes York was mounting, and while everyone acknowledged he was an intelligent, competent, experienced astronaut — was, according to the eggheads, a completely crazy choice for the Mission Specialist slot. The National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Geological Survey were throwing around a lot of crap about the fact that NASA even had a fully qualified Mars surface scientist, in Natalie York, but wasn’t planning to give her a seat on the mission. And all the other scientists in the corps, the geochemists and geophysicists and life scientists, had been overlooked as well.
It was Apollo all over again, they said.
Well, York had shown she could do a good job under pressure, on her assignment as Apollo-N capcom for instance, and she’d been putting in an impressive amount of time in the sims. She could probably handle the flight.
Muldoon knew that putting York on the mission as the MSP would shut up the science lobby for sure. And, he reflected, assigning York would have the side benefit of closing down another couple of lobbies — the minority interest ones — which complained long and hard about the way NASA still supposedly discriminated in favor of sending up white males.
He wrote out that list of names, now, to see how it would look:
CDR: Stone. MSP: York. MMP: Curval.
But York was a rookie.
He remembered what York herself had said, back at the time of her selection interviews. We need to get a scientist on Mars. But a dead scientist on Mars wouldn’t do anybody any good. The fact was, you weren’t talking about a trolley-car ride but an extended deep-space mission using complex, edge-of-the-envelope technology.