“Some little jerk called Dana,” Michaels said. “Gregory Dana. He wrote direct to me. Can you believe it?” Dana had bypassed all the bureaucratic channels, and had gotten right up a lot of asses.
“Is he right? About Venus?”
“How in hell do I know? Could I care less, at this point? This Dana has them all — the Marshall guys, the rest of Langley, the contractors, the budget office, the damn Science Advisory Committee — buzzing like wasps in a jar. The Requests For Proposal for Phase B detailed definition studies are about to go out. This Dana is putting all of that under threat. Bert, I want you to sort it out for me…”
Seger didn’t doubt his own ability to resolve the mode issue. Nor did he doubt that he’d be able to fulfill his greater commission: to pull together the Mars program. If that was what the country decided it wanted to do.
Seger always prayed, intensely, for a few minutes at the start of the working day, or before tackling a major task. He felt that showed that his character had deep roots, strength, conviction. Standing there in the MOCR, he offered up a brief prayer.
He thought of that fragile little world 240,000 miles away, where three LM descent stages still sat, surrounded by footprints and scuffed-up lunar soil. But the footprints, and the flags, even the science — none of that was really the point, as far as Seger was concerned. Not even getting there ahead of the Russians. To his mind, what Apollo had proved was that men could indeed travel to places beyond the Earth, and live and work there.
The Moon hadn’t been as exotic as some had suspected. Some had predicted that the astronauts would sink into miles of dust. Or that the mountains of the Moon might be fragile, like huge gray meringues maybe, and would collapse in puffs of dust when the astronauts tried to walk there. Or maybe the moondust would catch fire, or explode, when the astronauts brought it into the LM. Or the astronauts would be afflicted by terrible diseases…
In the end, those hardheaded engineers who had stubbornly insisted that the Moon would be just like Arizona — and had designed the LM’s landing gear that way — had turned out to be right. That’s what I’ve gotta bear in mind, he thought. Mars will be just like Arizona, too.
To Seger, that was a magical thought, as if Earth and Moon and Mars were somehow unified, physically bridged, as they were bridged by the exploits of Americans.
He walked carefully down the steps, away from the Flight Director’s console, and latched the door behind him.
Monday, August 16, 1971
Gregory Dana arrived late, his Vu-graph foils and reports bundled under his arm; by the time he reached the conference room — right next to the office of von Braun himself — it was already full, and he had to creep to the back to find a space.
The room was on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building, colloquially known as the von Braun Hilton. Just about everybody who counted seemed to be here: senior staff from Marshall and Houston, a few managers from NASA Headquarters in Washington, and a lot of people from the contractors whose studies were being presented today.
At the front of the room, so remote from Dana that it was difficult to see his face, Bert Seger, head of the nascent Mars Program Office, was making his opening remarks.
They were all here to listen to the Mars mission mode Phase A studies final presentations. Their purpose today, Seger said, was to settle on a recommended mode for the development program. The group had to regard itself as in competition for resources and endorsement with the parallel studies going on into the reusable Space Shuttle; a similar heavyweight meeting had recently been held in Williamsburg to thrash out some of the conceptual issues involved in that program.
In his rapid Bronx delivery Seger gave them a little pep talk: about the need for open discussion, for receptivity, and for a willingness for all there to walk out of the room with a consensus behind whatever mode was favored. Dana could see a little crucifix glinting on Seger’s lapel, under a wilting pink carnation.
Dana doubted that anyone missed the subtext of what Seger was saying. Congress was approving the requested funding for NASA’s FY1972, but the big expenditure for whatever program was settled on was going to start in FY1973. And President Nixon still hadn’t made up his mind about the future of the space program. It was said he might even can manned spaceflight altogether, and look for some superscience stunt on Earth that might prove a better fit with the mood of the times.
Meanwhile there was open warfare going on between two of NASA’s centers, Houston and Marshall, over their preferred Mars modes.
It was just what NASA didn’t need, and all the old hands at NASA had been there before, too many times. Dana knew that Seger had already been trying to get around the conflict by encouraging informal contacts and discussions, and by having the Houston people help with the devising of Marshall’s presentation, and so forth. And it was obvious that Seger’s intention today was to lance that boil before sending the recommendations farther up the chain of command.
Seger flashed up a draft agenda. The meeting was going to run for the whole day. The two major modes — chemical and nuclear — would be presented first, followed by the other studies…
Dana found with dismay that his would be the last of the five major presentations. I’m coming at the nutty end, he realized. Even after the guys from General Dynamics with their ludicrous atomic-bomb motor. I’m being wheeled on as light relief. In the midst of the organizational infighting, he was going to be squeezed out; he had probably upset too many people by circumventing the hierarchy. He felt his stomach knot up with frustration and anxiety. Damn it, I know I’m right, that I have the way we should be going to Mars, right here in this folder. He pushed his spectacles up onto his nose, agitated.
First up was the nuclear rocket option.
Dana thought the timing was significant; that option, heavily pushed by Marshall, was, he had heard, the preferred option among the NASA brass.
The presentation was opened by a hairy young man called Mike Conlig. Conlig reported into Marshall, but he had worked for several years at the nuclear rocket development station in Nevada. “We’ve achieved twenty-eight starts of our XE-Prime liquid hydrogen prototype, running up in excess of fifty-five thousand pounds of thrust.” Conlig showed a photograph of an ungainly test rig, framed by dismal mountains. “Next we will proceed to the development of NERVA 1, which will develop seventy-five thousand pounds of thrust. Then the full NERVA 2 module will be developed, to support the Mars mission itself. NERVA 2 will be flight-tested in the mid 1970s, in fact launched into orbit as a new Saturn V third stage…”
Conlig spoke well and enthusiastically; Dana let the data rattle through his head.
Next a slim, cold-looking man, his blond hair speckled with gray, walked to the stage. “To achieve the necessary performance for interplanetary travel, we have evolved a ‘building block’ technology, in which separate NERVA propulsion modules will be launched into Earth orbit, and clustered to achieve different requirements…” The voice was shallow, a little clipped — overlaid by a disconcerting Alabama drawl, after all the years at Huntsville — but still underpinned by sharp Teutonic consonants.
This was Hans Udet: Udet, who had worked at Peenemьnde with von Braun and was one of von Braun’s senior people at Marshall.
Dana showed no reaction.
Dana had dealt with the Huntsville Germans many times, during his years at NASA. And he recognized, in the halls and offices of NASA, many faces from those ancient days in the Harz Mountains.
But he had never been recognized, in his turn — why should he be? — and he had never volunteered his identity. He had mentioned this antique link to no one. The Mittelwerk was buried deep in the past, and they had all moved on to new concerns.