Under the surface of talk and networking, Fred Michaels was running over the events of the day.
Michaels had inherited the idea of the Executives Group from his predecessors at NASA. The Group consisted of the space program’s top people: Michaels and his NASA senior managers, and the prime contractors’ senior executives, from Rockwell, Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM. It was an elite club that Michaels liked to bring together four or five times a year.
Today had been a good day, he decided. The Executives Group session had gone well, and Bush’s closing address had been encouraging. Michaels had worried about losing outgoing veep Ted Kennedy, who, with his brother, continued to support the space program. Today, though, Bush seemed to be positioning himself as — if not an advocate — then at least as an ally.
Yes, a good day. But Michaels was tensed up, his big stomach growling. He always found it impossible to relax in the middle of a mission. Any one of a hundred thousand malfunctions could, he knew, spell the end of the flight, and maybe cost the crew members their lives, and conceivably put a bullet to the head of the whole Mars initiative — and, incidentally, Michaels’s own career. How the hell could anyone relax through that? And tonight there were not one but two American crews beyond the atmosphere, one floating around the Earth with a nuke on its tail, and the other bouncing off the Moon with those Russians. What a situation.
Still, the S-NB seemed to be functioning well, so much so that Hans Udet — the most senior of Marshall’s Germans on the project — had felt able to take time out to be there with the Executives tonight. Michaels could see him, glad-handing a brace of congressmen with all the Prussian charisma and charm at his disposal. Udet looks confident enough. Why the hell shouldn’t I be?
That was when the phone calls started coming in.
Afterward, Michaels would never be sure who had gotten the first call.
He saw the president of Rockwell in excited conversation with another man. Then all the Rockwell executives left the club’s main room and returned a few minutes later, visibly distressed. They began to go through the room, seeking out others; Michaels could see the news — whatever it was — spreading through the Executives Group like a contagion of dismay.
Then Michaels himself was paged to take a call from Tim Josephson, who was still at NASA Headquarters a few blocks away.
“Fred, the crew has lost the NERVA. The technical parameters got out of their nominal boundaries. Ah — in fact, the thing might have exploded.”
“Jesus Christ. And the crew?” Michaels snapped. “What about the damn crew, Josephson?”
Josephson’s voice was even, analytical. “It’s hard to say from here, Fred. The updates are patchy. I’d say we’re looking at a potential crew loss situation.”
A waiter paged Michaels with another urgent call. This time it was Bert Seger from Houston. Seger, his voice high and clipped, gave him more details: some kind of runaway in the NERVA reactor, extensive damage to the Service Module, damage unknown to the Command Module -
Michaels cut him short. No American astronauts had been killed in space before. No previous Administrator had lost a crew. “Bring them home, Bert.”
Michaels felt someone grabbing at his arm. It was Udet; the tall German was smiling, a little flushed with the drink. Udet wanted to introduce Michaels to a portly senator.
Michaels drew Udet to one side, and told him the news.
Udet’s smile evaporated. He seemed to withdraw into himself; he held himself straight and erect, his face a mask. With precision, he put his glass down on a waiter’s tray.
“What must we do?”
“Hans, I want you to call the White House and tell them what’s happened. Tell them I’ll be in contact as soon as I can. And then I want you to get the hell out of here and back to Marshall.”
The German nodded his head and walked stiffly from the room. Michaels watched him go.
He thought back. Seger’s telephoned voice had been distant, light, oddly false; Michaels felt a stab of worry. But the guy is under incredible pressure. Of course he’s going to sound strange. As long as he stays in one piece long enough to get the bird down. Seger’s mental state was something Michaels could deal with later. Christ, I’m going to have a few crazies on my hands before we’re done with this damn business.
Michaels walked back to his guests in the reception room. Obviously word was continuing to spread among them. Hell, they only need to look at my face to see that. He even saw one man crying.
In the dining room the waiters were laying out dinner; nobody was paying any attention to them.
Michaels found Bush and spoke briefly with him. Then he called for quiet and broke the news officially to the rest of the guests.
After that the group broke up quickly. The contractors who had hardware involved in the accident left to find planes to take them to Houston.
Michaels made his apologies to Bush, left the club, and ordered his driver to take him to NASA Headquarters.
Wednesday, December 3, 1980
The Astronaut Office was quiet that night. With two shots aloft — and with one of them in trouble — most of the pilots were wrapped up in work in support of the flights in the simulators, or working at contractors’ plants around the country.
Ralph Gershon was there, though, in the office. As a MEM specialist he didn’t have any specific assignments to do with the current shots. But he’d heard something about the problems on the NERVA flight today. He’d gone over to the MOCR, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do there. He was just in the way, radiating anxiety all over everybody else. So he made sure his location was known, in case he was needed, and he sat in the office he shared, quietly going through his in-tray.
The phone rang. He picked it up on the first ring.
“Ralph? I’m glad I caught you.”
“Natalie? Are you still on shift?”
“Yeah. Rolf Donnelly asked me to call you. I—”
“Yes?”
“We think we might lose the crew.”
Gershon could hear voices in the MOCR behind her, taut, shouting.
York wanted Gershon to arrange for astronauts and wives to go to the homes of the crew.
Gershon agreed straightaway, and York hung up.
It was a tradition, dating back to Mercury, that if you had to receive bad news like this, you’d get it from an astronaut, or his wife — someone close enough to the risks and pressures to understand how you’d be feeling.
Gershon dug out his phone book. He’d start with people he knew lived close to the families.
The assignment was going to be as hard a mission as he’d performed in his life.
He began to dial.
Venting gas.
Donnelly understood the implications of that observation as well as anyone.
On the loop he said, “Okay, now, Indigo Team, let’s everyone keep cool. We’re going to stick to the mission rules, and remember the priorities.
“Let’s go back to basics. EECOM tells me that right now we still have a sealed can.” An airtight ship, a place to keep the astronauts alive. “We’ve faced situations like this many times in the sims” — but never for real, damn it — “and you know that having a sealed can is always the number one requirement; as long as we have that, at least, we have time to figure things out. We’re going to solve this problem, but we’ll take our time over it, because we have the time; we don’t need to make things worse by guessing. Now, let’s get to it.”
It seemed to do some good; the atmosphere in the MOCR, the angle of hunch of the white-shirted shoulders, seemed to ease a little. Donnelly nodded to himself, pleased; maybe he’d lanced the boil of panic that had been building up.