It was an insidious, strangely seductive argument.
The machine is everything! Oh, we have to put men inside those machines, and we have a few problems with that, and some of them are driven crazy by their experiences, and some of them die, in squalid, painful, unheroic ways — as dear Ben had died, decaying in a hospital bed, a month after his flight — but it’s worth it for the goal.
And besides, we’re never short of volunteers.
What made it worse was that NASA — a child of the Cold War — never told the truth about a situation if it didn’t have to. And certainly not if the truth damaged PR. So much was hidden behind the glamour: the dangers, the awful shitty deaths, the almost psychotic desire by some, engineers and crew, to keep on flying.
It isn’t just Mike. There isn’t even a “them” to blame for this.
All the astronauts were implicated: all of those who would volunteer for the most dangerous mission, and go along with the cover-ups. Even Ben himself. He’d worked on NERVA; he must have had a good idea of its lack of flight readiness.
Even me, she admitted at last. Even I am guilty. I agonize about compromising my scientific principles by being here. But it’s more than that.
By being in the program, by giving it my tacit support, I killed Ben, as surely as that failed NERVA.
She sat in a chair and curled over on herself, tucking her arms into her belly, letting her head drop to her knees.
And now I have to decide. Do I get out? Maybe start shrieking the truth to the world?
Or will it make Ben’s death mean something, if I stay?
Something inside her, cold and hard and selfish, pointed out that it was Ben who had died, not her. And Mars was still there, waiting for her.
Maybe she was just rationalizing; maybe she was just trying to find a way to justify staying in the program.
And maybe she’d thrown out Mike and his talk of martyrs so angrily because — somewhere inside her — there was a part of her own soul that agreed with his brutal analysis.
The next day she had the locks changed. She packed up Mike’s stuff and sent it to Huntsville. And she made the Portofino apartment available for sublet.
Tuesday, January 20, 1981
When the first draft of NASA’s internal report landed on his desk, Michaels called a meeting of Seger, Muldoon, and Udet in his office in Washington.
The three of them sat in a row on the other side of his desk. Muldoon was tense, angry, uncomfortable; Seger seemed eager, energetic, somehow too bright; and Udet was reserved, watching Michaels and the others through his pale blue eyes.
Michaels picked up the draft report and dropped it on his desk. “I’ve tried to read this. I know I’m going to have to answer for it line by line. Gentlemen, I want you to walk me through this fucking blowout. Step by step, over and again, until I understand. You got that? Hans, you want to lead?”
Udet nodded crisply. “Of course, Fred. The malfunction occurred at the time at which we were preparing the S-NB for its restart burn. I will remind you that the rocket had functioned flawlessly during its first burn—”
“I remember.”
“The moderators were adjusted to lift the temperature of the core to its working range of three thousand degrees. The turbopumps were started, and hydrogen began to flow through the cooling jackets and the core. We registered thrust rising to its nominal levels; the cabin transcript indicates the crew was aware of this. Then—”
“And then,” Joe Muldoon observed drily, “we hit a glitch.”
The flow of liquid hydrogen into the coolant jackets became intermittent, Udet said. It turned out later that a flaw was developing in the piping carrying the hydrogen to the engine.
Michaels asked, “Shouldn’t you have shut down the core as soon as that happened?”
“Yeah, that’s standard procedure,” Muldoon put in. “Without coolant, the core is going to overheat.”
“We had a split second to make the decision,” Udet said. “That is all. If we had allowed emergency shutdown immediately, we might have lost the engine altogether, and the mission would have been scrubbed. And perhaps for nothing, if the flow problems had rectified themselves. We were trying to keep options open. The report describes all this.”
“All right, Hans. Go on.”
“We adjusted the moderators to reduce the temperature in the core, short of shutting it down. But we could not reach the target temperature—”
Muldoon said, “And there you have your first basic design flaw, Fred.”
Both Udet and Seger leaned forward to protest, but Michaels waved them silent.
“We only had one control system — the reactor moderator — and so only one shutdown option. When that failed, we had no way to stop the runaway temperature climb.”
Michaels nodded. “Hans?”
Udet spread his hands. “We must balance reliability against weight, Fred. This has been the dilemma of all spaceflight: to carry an additional redundant system, or to add value elsewhere? In our opinion, in this case, the moderator system was sufficiently reliable to justify flying without the weight penalty of a backup.”
“Bert? You want to comment?”
Seger, his eyes brilliant, shrugged his narrow shoulders. “We made the best call we could; we did all the tests. We got it wrong. Next time we fly a NERVA, we’ll fix it.”
These things happen. Not an answer to satisfy the Presidential Commission, Michaels thought sourly.
“Go on, Hans.”
“By now,” Udet said, “the crew was aware that the thrust had died, after that first shove. We were only a few seconds after the first glitch in the flow. Now the hydrogen flow increased, markedly,” Udet continued. “It was like a spurt, from the faulty piping. The hydrogen passed its nominal flow rate and effectively flooded the core. We withdrew the moderator further—”
“And this is another point at which the standard procedure said shutdown,” Muldoon said harshly. “The moderators’ control margin was too low now; we didn’t have full control of the core. But again, we overrode the automatics.”
“We tried to save the mission,” Udet said.
“All right. Let’s stick to the facts for now; we can justify ourselves later. What next?”
“Now the flow of coolant into the core stopped altogether,” Udet said. “Perhaps at this point the piping failed completely.”
“This is the key moment, Fred,” Muldoon said. “You have a reactor that’s already unstable. The hydrogen flood has made the core isothermal — that is, at the same temperature throughout — so any changes happen all over the core, simultaneously. And the coolant flow has stopped; the core’s main heat sink, the flow of hydrogen through the jackets, has gone.”
“So it starts to heat up.”
“So it starts to heat up. Uniformly. And a lot faster than before.”
Udet said, “We tried to shut down. But the moderator was too far out of the core to have any immediate effect. The hydrogen in the core and the jacket boiled quickly and started to expand…”
“And now you’ve got a runaway,” Muldoon continued. “Because the reactor was designed with a positive temperature coefficient.”
Michaels sighed and locked his hands behind his head. “Just pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Muldoon grinned tightly. “I know. It took me a while to figure this stuff out. Look: suppose the temperature of your core rises. And suppose that the core is designed so that when it heats up, the reactivity drops — that is, the reaction rate automatically falls. That’s what’s meant by a ‘negative temperature coefficient.’ In that case you have a negative feedback loop, and your reaction falls off, and the temperature is damped down.”