I won’t try to describe the next twenty minutes. We followed a mazelike series of roads, past all kinds of buildings, some looking like temporaries meant to be tom down ten years ago, some beautiful designs in poured concrete with green grass lawns and built-in sprinkler systems that cast a gauzy rainbow effect over them. Everywhere there were cars, cars of all types. Black government cars, olive-drab military cars, light blue NASA cars, cars from the different associated servicing companies with company decals on the doors; cars parked , and cars moving, cars with single occupants, cars chauffeured by men in livery or uniforms, cars filled with shirt-sleeved, brown-tanned men; cars all with one thing in common: the windows were closed—all were air-conditioned. Somehow that struck me as the most profound observation I’d ever made at the Cape.
It’s a busy place and growing all the time. When the first Vertical Assembly Building was built for the Saturn moon rockets, back in the mid*sixties, the government was justifiably proud of it. It’s fifty-two stories tall, and covers eight acres. It’s so big that it has its own interior weather conditions, because if they didn’t keep a very sophisticated air-conditioning system in operation, clouds might form up near the ceiling, and they might get rain.
But of course since then we’ve been using the Orion-type rockets, and by a peculiar coincidence, they just happen to be a little too big for the first Assembly Building, so we have Building #2. This one is sixty stories tall, and just right. I once asked one of my instructors what was to stop them from coming up with a bigger class of rocket, which would require its own, larger Assembly Building. He gave me a long lecture, which boiled down to: They won’t. It seems that we’re too sophisticated in our engine designs now to need bigger rockets, and in all likelihood, the future evolution of Earth-based rockets will be smaller, rather than bigger. If we need bigger ones, we’ll assemble them in orbit.
At any rate, even without the need for a third building, there is still plenty of construction going on all the time at the Cape. And of course there’s a lot of construction that has nothing to do with new launching facilities, like all the streets we crossed that were dug up on one side for newer, bigger, or better (or all three—take your pick) gas, water, or some such utility services.
A busy place, as I said.
We ended up in a medical reception center, where we were put through a fast final physical, and given our shots. These were antinausea shots, designed to save us from making messes when our inner ears told us down was up, or that we weighed the wrong amount. We’d already been fitted for our space suits, and had ten hours time in the simulators with them, so they were no real problem. We zipped into our knit, one-piece jump suits, climbed into our space suits, were tested out to make sure all the servomechanisms were functioning, and then waited.
The waiting was what nearly got me. I complained about it later, to a corpsman, and was razzed about it, but it bugged me; it really did. It seems as though government service—any branch—is mostly spent waiting. Red tape I’d heard about, been warned about. But this waiting! I’m used to fine-point efficiency. I was brought up on it. Throughout Space School we learned efficiency. It’s part of survival. Space is the last—and biggest—frontier. You learn to do things well, or you don’t have another chance. That’s efficiency: Learning to do the most with the least effort. It’s economy, but it’s also pushing yourself to the maximum, doing everything you can do at this moment, right now. It’s learning the fastest and easiest way to suit up, for instance. It’s arranging in advance so that when you’re finished with one job, the next is lined up and ready for you, but hasn’t been waiting more than a moment. It’s making things dovetail neatly together, rather than arranging things sloppily, and ending up with a mess. It appeals to me. It always has. I like to see the gears mesh cleanly, smoothly, with no grinding. I like to do things without wasted effort.
I like to be efficient.
But there is, I learned, a limit to efficiency. It has something to do with Parkinson’s Law, which is something Bix told me about: “The more people you put on a job, the less work will get done.’’
The government is huge—its services embrace the whole country. It seems as though everything is getting too big these days for private industry—-or that, left to private industry, needed things, things which wouldn’t make a profit, just wouldn’t get done. So the government steps in—somebody has to—and does it.
And that’s where Parkinson comes in. There are too many people in civil service. Why, I'm in civil service, if it comes to that: NASA is a government agency, after all. And while an operation works efficiently on a local level (if there’s a good administrator!), just try it on a national scale ...
Take us. We arrived on the Cape at 11:35. We were finished being put through the mill by 13:00. And liftoff was for 17:05.
It’s true, they could’ve juggled things around to save waiting time, but it would’ve been at the expense of some other operation.
We would lift at 17:05, and that was that. We bad a comparatively narrow “window”—six minutes—for which to shoot, and there would be no deviation there. But nobody wanted to be caught half finished with anything by then, either. So they allowed “slack time.” They figured on traffic tie-ups between our hotel and the airport. They figured on something, maybe bad-weather conditions, forcing a premature landing. They figured, for all I know, on a volcano erupting between the landing field and the medical reception center. They figured on delays of every sort, delays we had no reason to expect, but which might just crop up anyway, and figured it out so that we’d still be ready to lift at 17:05.
Of course, everything had gone off without a hitch, so there we were, with four hours to kill. That’s bureaucratic efficiency for you.
I don’t know whether I need to explain that business about the launch “window” or not. Some of these things are so much a part of my training that I take them for granted—and then when I mention them in a casual conversation with a civvy, all I get is a blank stare.
It’s this way: The Station is in a permanent orbit. It, like most of the satellites launched originally from Kennedy, is on an equatorial orbit—it follows the equator in its path around the Barth, rather than looping over the poles, as most of the small military observation satellites launched from the West Coast do. Now, to send a rocket up to meet the Station is a feat of very precise ballistics. Although a rocket is self-powered, and can change course, and do other relatively sophisticated things, it’s really pretty much a big bullet, being fired at a moving target. It’s like trying to bring down a duck with a rifle—or whatever it is hunters do on heavily overcast late-fall mornings—you follow that duck along with your gun, and you fire, not at the point where it is, but at where it will be, by the time your bullet gets up there.
Now, suppose you couldn’t move your gun much; you couldn’t follow the bird with it. Then, assuming the silly creature flies overhead at all, there will be only a fleeting moment when you can fire, and hit that bird. That moment-is your “window.” Fire at the beginning of the “window” and you’ll hit the bird’s head; a split second later, and you’ll graze tail feathers.
The Station is, proportionately, a much tinier target, moving faster, and vastly farther away. But the “bullet”—in our case a Saturn “C” rocket—is maneuverable to some extent, and the whole shot is in the hands of a hair-triggered computer system. So there would be a six-minute period during which we could fire and make it into that sector of space—our actual “window”—where we would intersect the Station ... and, on top of everything else, at compatible velocities.
Let me footnote that: It’s all very well to shoot a bullet at a bird and make a hit, but we did not want to stretch the analogy that far, we did not want to shoot down, or wound, the Station. Instead, we had to cut things so fine that, having boosted ourselves into the same orbit, we would coast right into a landing bay at the Station. This means matched velocities. There are a lot of tricky parts to the problem; for instance,
it requires a specific velocity to maintain any given orbit at a given distance from Earth’s surface. A faster velocity means a higher orbit; a slower velocity will drop you closer to the surface. Clear? Now let’s suppose you gained orbit—the same orbit as the Station: the same “track” over the same parts of the world, at the same height—but on the opposite side of the world from the Station.
What do you do?
You can’t try just to stop and hang there, waiting, till the Station comes up from behind. Try that, and Mother Gravity exerts her hold, and you plummet straight down like a meteorite.
And, on the other hand, you can’t just speed up and overtake the Station, either. Because your increase in velocity is going to elevate your orbit. By the time you’ve overtaken the Station, you’ll be hundreds of miles higher.
That will give you a rough idea of the problems the computers had to handle, and why, on any given day, there was only a brief moment when a successful shot could be made.
I’ve boiled it down, of course. There are sophisticated answers to the problems I mentioned—with the right equipment and knowledge, you can catch up with, or drop back to, a station on the opposite side of the world. And, sometimes, you are faced with solving problems like that yourself, as I was later to find out.
At about 16:00, they put us in a bus, and took us out to the launching pad.
This one being a passenger pad, there were permanent facilities, like a decent waiting room, with piped-in music, an underground shuttle to the tower elevator, and a certain civilian look which you won’t find outside of consumer-oriented facilities. I half expected to see one of those machines where a quarter gets you flight insurance.
We were still milling around gawking at things when five newcomers entered, also suited up. We all had our helmets slung back on our shoulders, so I don’t know why it took me as long as it did, but at first I did not recognize the Cramers.
Bix nudged me. “Look—it’s your girl friend, and parent.”
Mary waved at me and started over. Dr. Cramer remained with the other three men—Station staff members, I rightly guessed.
“Hi, Paul,” Mary said. She was grinning hugely.
“Hi,” I said, with less enthusiasm. I did not care to have Mary pegged by one and all as my “girl friend.” We just happened to go on TV together; that's all.
“You're going up with us?”
“Sure—didn't I tell you?”
“Well, no.”
“It must’ve been all that excitement about the park and everything. Sure. That’s why we were in the same hotel as you. We had a different plane down, though. They never let Daddy go anywhere without a huge security guard.” She winked. “He's supposed to be very valuable.”
“But, I, ummm... I mean, uhh, why are you going up with us?” I managed to ask.
She flashed the happy-puppy smile at me again. “I managed to con Daddy into taking me. He's been wanting an assistant. You know—somebody who can do all his paperwork without messing it all up—and I managed to convince him that I'd make a better assistant than anyone else they’re likely to give him. I mean, I've been reading over Daddy’s shoulder since I was five.” She stopped, breathless.
“Who’s your friend?” she asked suddenly.
“Oh! Umm, this is Bix,” I said. “Bix Beiderbecke.”
Mary gave Bix a funny look, and then scowled at me. “You're putting me on.”
“Huh?”
“I'm not stupid. I know who Bix Beiderbecke is—was, I mean.”
“I’m a distant relative,” Bix said.
“Wait a minute,” I cut in. “Clue me in. What’s this jazz all about?”
Mary smiled, then winked at Bix. That put me on my guard. “You mean you don't know?” she asked.
“I never heard the name before I met Bix,” I said truthfully.
“Well, you put your finger on it, anyway.”
“How’s that?”
“ ‘All this jazz,”’ Bix said cryptically.
“My father has a big collection of his records,” Mary said. “All on those funny old-fashioned ones that break.”
“Whose records?” I shouted. Several heads turned inquiringly. I did my best to throttle my temper down. I don’t like being kidded. Not like this, anyway. It’s too much like being put deliberately on the outside. I’ve had enough of that, anyway.
Both of them seemed to realize the joke had run its course.
“Bix Beiderbecke,” Mary said.
“My distant relative,” Bix said.
“He was a jazz musician.”
“You know—Dixieland, rinky-tinky-tink-tink.”
“No, Chicago-style. He played a good comet, and piano too.”
“Well, he died young, anyway.”
“He’s the one they used for that book Young Man with a Horn*' Mary said.
“But it wasn’t exactly factual,” Bix added.
“O.K., O.K.,” I said. I held up my hands. “So in some fields I am ignorant. About music I know nothing, except that once when I was whistling in the shower somebody told me to shut up before I cracked all the mirrors.”
They both laughed.
“Attention, everyone. Please assemble at the loading doors.** It was a PA announcement. I glanced at the chronometer on the inside of my wrist.
It was 16:35.
Chapter 4
I REMEMBER THE first time I watched a launching at the Cape. I was a first-year student at the Space School, and this was our first trip to see the Cape. I was pretty cool about it; after all, I’d seen plenty of launchings on TV, and we’d studied film-strips which broke liftsoff down into their slow-motion components already.
But it was different when the two dozen of us stood in a hushed group in the local-control blockhouse, each of us straining for a glimpse through the heavy quartz windows, and alternating our attention to the closed-circuit color Sonies monitoring the launch.
Local-control had finished its technical countdown, and relinquished ground control to Houston, where the space-center computers were counting out the last second of the actual countdown.
Somebody once told me that the countdown is a gimmick thought up by the makers of an early German science fiction movie, to add suspense. But it’s a vitally important procedure that is followed exactly with every launch.
Look at it this way: A countdown is not a man droning, “T minus blah seconds.” A countdown is a final checkout of every functioning aspect of the rocket system. It’s like starting a car. You follow a prescribed pattern. Key into ignition, ignition on, a check of instruments—gas O.K., battery isn’t dead—and then the starter. That’s simple, though, and nothing much happens if you goof the “countdown” in starting a car.
The countdown really started with the airplane. When you fly an airplane (and I know something about this; I’ve -had several hours as a student in a small plane), you have to check out all sorts of things before you get off the ground—or else. A pilot has a list of items to be checked: Drain water from the gas tanks, check the oil level, test the controls, check the instruments—all the little things that add up to a plane being in proper shape for flying. The fellow who took up the plane I was training in after I did, by the way, got cocky. He didn’t stick to the list, because he figured that if I had just used it, he was O.K. He checked the oil in a big hurry and didn’t get the pressurized cap back on. He lost oil pressure, oil, and engine—in that order—at 3,000 feet, and his instructor made a soft landing in somebody’s bean field. The plane flipped over only once, and nobody was hurt.
A rocket is a lot more sophisticated. Its engines are simpler, but its auxiliary equipment takes hours to check out. There are all the guidance systems to check out for proper response: the inboard computer system, the booster couplings—and, of course, the entire relay system between the Cape and Houston, and all the rest.
A modem countdown is simply a long list with every functioning servomechanism or system on it, with a checkout for each. And you have to tim
e it all so that the rocket is ready for launching at the proper moment.
We’ve attained a pretty good state of the art by now; things usually come off nicely, without a glitch. But there’s always the chance that some minor part will cause trouble and delay the whole shoot—so there’s always tension in the air until the technical countdown is complete. Then the computers take over, and all that’s left is to fire the rocket at the mathematically proper moment.
Now the technical men in the blockhouse were leaning back, their job over. Everything was “All systems go” and locked onto automatic. For them, this was just another launch, and as good as finished. For us kids, the drama would be in the moment of ignition, and that’s what we waited for.
Then it came!
A quarter of a mile away, the flat bright noontime vista was shattered by the frightening roar of the giant Saturn engines, and on the Sonies we could see the bright torch of the exhaust blackening out the center of the TV screens, while white clouds boiled up around the launch pad.
Thunder came up through the floor of the blockhouse, into the soles of my feet, and I was grabbed by a feeling of terrible awe—the overwhelming knowledge that I was a very junior member of the race that had conquered nature and the vastness of space and had built that: an unbelievably powerful engine of exploration, a probing needle that hovered for only moments over its pad and then arched up, high into the sky, climbing into the towering heavens— into the realm of the gods.
It seemed to me then a frighteningly audacious thing Man had done: a challenge to the Creator that could not be left unanswered, whether by reward or punishment, I did not know. For all of his history, Man had walked the surface of his planet, or sailed the surface of its oceans, learning to fly only a brief time ago, as history is reckoned, and then little higher than the birds.
Now Man was liberating himself of his natural dimension, daring a frontier more vast and terrible than any before it. I felt that, and it scared me. It also made me tremblingly proud, so proud to be a part of this vast quest that I felt the tears in my eyes and knew I was crying without embarrassment. I wasn’t the only one.
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