The blocky black and white buildings of JSC were scattered over the landscaped lawns like children’s blocks, with big black nursery-style identifying numbers on their sides. Between the buildings were Chinese tallow trees and tough, thick-bladed, glowing green Texas grass; sprinklers seemed to work all the time, hissing peacefully, a sound that always reminded her of a Joni Mitchell album she’d gotten too fond of in her teenage years.
But JSC was showing its age. Most of the buildings were more than forty years old; despite the boldness of the chunky 1960s style the buildings themselves were visibly ageing, and after decades of budget cutbacks looked shabby: the concrete stained, the paint peeling. On her first visits here she’d been struck by the narrow corridors and gloomy ceiling tiles of many of the older buildings; it was more like some beat-up welfare agency than the core of a space program.
As he’d promised, Jake Hadamard was waiting for her at the car park close to the PAO. The lot was pretty full: old hands said wearily that there hadn’t been so much press interest in NASA since Challenger.
They piled into Hadamard’s car. It was a small ’00 Dodge, He drove out through the security barrier, down Second Street, and towards NASA Road One, the public highway. Hadamard grinned. “I have a limousine here I can use, with a driver,” he said. “But my job is kind of diffuse. I like to be able to do things personally from time to time.”
Benacerraf said, “So, you drive for release.”
“I guess.”
To the right of Second Street, which ran through the heart of JSC, was the Center’s rocket garden. There was a Little Joe — a test rocket for Apollo — and a Mercury-Redstone, looking absurdly small and delicate. The black-and-white-striped Redstone booster was just a simple tube, so slim the Mercury capsule’s heat shield overhung it. The Redstone was upright but braced against wind damage with wires; it looked, Benacerraf thought, as if it had been tied to the Earth, Gulliver-style. And, just before the big stone “Lyndon B Johnson Space Center” entry sign at NASA One, they passed, on the right, the Big S itself: a Saturn V moon rocket, complete with Apollo, broken into pieces and lying on its side.
A small group of tourists, evidently bussed over from the visitors’ center, Space Center Houston, hung about in front of the Redstone. They wore shorts and baseball caps, and their bare skin was coated with image-tattoos, and they looked up at the Redstone with baffled incomprehension.
But then, Benacerraf thought, it was already more than four decades since Alan Shepard’s first sub-orbital lob in a tin can like this. Two generations. No wonder these young bedecked visitors looked on these crude Cold War relics with bemusement.
Hadamard pulled out onto NASA Road One, and headed west. As he drove he sat upright, his grey-blond hair close-cropped, his hands resting confidently on the wheel as the car’s internal processor took them smoothly through the traffic.
They cut south down West NASA Boulevard, and pulled off the road and into a park. Hadamard drove into a parking area. The lot was empty save for a big yellow school bus.
“Let’s walk,” Hadamard said.
They got out of the car.
The park was wide, flat, tree-lined, green. The air was still, silent, save for the sharp-edged rustle of crickets, and the distant voices of a bunch of children, presumably decanted from the bus. Benacerraf could see the kids in the middle distance, running back and forth, some kind of sports day.
Hadamard, wearing neat dark sunglasses and a NASA baseball cap, led the way across the field.
Benacerraf took a big breath of air, and swung her arms around in the empty space.
Hadamard grinned at her, and his shades cast dazzling highlights. “Feels like coming home, huh.”
“You bet.” She thought about it. “You know, I don’t think I’ve walked on grass, except for taking short cuts across the JSC campus, since I got back from orbit.”
“You should get out more.” He scuffed at the grass with his patent leather shoes. “This is where we belong, after all. Here, on Earth, where we’ve spent four billion years adapting to the weather.”
“So you don’t think we ought to be travelling in space.”
He shrugged, and patted at his belly. “Not in this kind of design. A big heavy bag of water. Spacecraft are mostly plumbing, after all… Humans don’t belong up there.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Well, they don’t. You should hear what the scientists say to me. Every time someone sneezes on Station, a microgravity protein growth experiment is wrecked.”
Benacerraf said, “You’re repeating the criticisms that are coming out in the Commission hearings. You know, it’s like 1967 over again, after the Apollo fire.”
“Yes, but back then they managed to restrict the inquiries afterward to a NASA internal investigation. And that meant they could keep most of the recommendations technical rather than managerial.”
Benacerraf grunted. “Neat trick.”
Hadamard laughed. “Well, the Administrator back then was a wily old fox who knew how to play those guys up on the Hill. But I’m no Jim Webb. After Challenger we had a Presidential Commission, just like the one that we’re facing now.”
They reached the woods, and the seagull-like cries of the children receded.
Eventually they came to a glade. A monument stood on a little square of bark-covered ground, enclosed by the trees, and the dappled sunlight reflected from its upper surface. It was box-like, waist high, and constructed of some kind of black granite.
It was peaceful here. She wondered what the hell Hadamard wanted.
Jake Hadamard took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and looked at Benacerraf. “Paula, do you know where you are? When I first came to work at NASA, I was struck by the—” he hesitated “—the invisibility of the Challenger incident. I mean, there are plenty of monuments around JSC to the great triumphs of the past, like Apollo 11. Pictures on the walls, the flight directors’ retirement plaques, Mission Control in Building 30 restored 1960s style as a national monument, for God’s sake.
“But Challenger might never have happened.
“It’s the same if you go around the Visitors’ Center. You have your Lego exhibits and your Station displays and your pig-iron toy Shuttles in the playground, and that inspirational music playing on a tape loop all the time. But again, Challenger might never have happened.
“Outside NASA, it’s different. For the rest of us, Challenger was one of the defining moments of the 1980s. The moment when a dream died.”
He said us. Benacerraf found the word startling; she studied Hadamard with new interest.
He said, “Look around Houston and Clear Lake. You have Challenger malls and car lots and drug stores… And look at this monument.”
Benacerraf bent to see. The monument’s white lettering had weathered badly, but she could still make out the Harris County shield inset on the front, and, on the top, the mission patch for Challenger’s final flight: against a Stars-and-Stripes background, the doomed orbiter flying around Earth, with those seven too-familiar names around the rim: McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Scobee, Smith, Jarvis, McAuliffe.
“We’re in the Challenger Seven Memorial Park,” Hadamard said. “You see, what’s interesting to me is that this little monument wasn’t raised by NASA, but by the local people.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at, Jake.”
“I’m trying to understand how, over two decades, these NASA people have come to terms with the Challenger thing. Because I need to learn how to size up the recommendations I’m getting from you for the way forward after Columbia.”
Benacerraf said, “You want to know if you can trust us.”
He didn’t smile.
“NASA people didn’t launch that Chinese girl into orbit,” she said. “And that’s the source of the pressure on you to come up with some way to keep flying.”
“Is it?”
Benacerraf decided to probe. “You know, now that I’m getting to know you, you aren’t what
I expected.”
He smiled. “Not just a bean counter, a politico on the make? Paula, I am both of those things. I’m not going to deny it, and I’m not ashamed of either of them. We need politicos and bean counters to make our world go round. But—”
“What?”
“I wasn’t born an accountant. I was seventeen when Apollo 11 landed. I painted my room black with stars, and had a big Moon map on the ceiling—”
“You?”
“Sure.”
“And you’re the NASA Administrator.”
He shrugged. “I’m the Administrator who was on watch when Columbia turned into a footprint on that salt lake.
“I’m going through hell, frankly, facing that White House Commission. Phil Gamble is getting the whipping in the media, but the Commission are just beating up on me. And then there’s the pressure from the Air Force. You know, over the years the Air Force has made some big mistakes chasing manned spaceflight. They wasted a lot of money on projects that didn’t come to fruition: the X-20 spaceplane, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory… In the 1970s they were pushed into relying on the Shuttle as their sole launch vehicle. That single space policy mistake cost them twenty billion dollars, they tell me, in today’s money. And now we got Columbia, and the fleet is grounded again. You can bet that if Shuttle never flies again, there will be plenty in USAF who won’t shed a tear.
“Now, facing lobbies like that, with institutional rivalries going back a half century, I sure as hell am not prepared to go into bat for any kind of shit-headed NASA insider stuff about how everything is fine and dandy, just another technical glitch we can get over with a little work. Did you know that the NASA management recommended just continuing with the Shuttle launch schedule in the immediate wake of Challenger? They had to be forced to take a hiatus while they figured out and fixed the problems. You will not find this Administrator making the same mistake.”
“I’ll tell you how we can minimize risk,” Benacerraf said hotly. “We just won’t fly. Jake, we’re flying experimental aircraft, here. You just can’t expect the public to see it this way. We’re the professionals. We understand the risks, and we accept them. That’s why there are no Challenger tombstones and memorials and plaques all over JSC. Jake, you have to have a little taste. You can’t keep looking back at some disaster, all the time. We have to move on. We’re looking at the future of humanity here, the expansion of the human race into—”
Hadamard waved her silent. “Let’s save the speeches, Paula. Besides, I think you are too smart to believe it. The truth is we are never going to move out into deep space. There’s nowhere to go. The Moon’s dead, Venus is an inferno, Mars is almost as dead as the Moon. And even if there was a worthwhile destination the journey would kill us. We’re not going anywhere, not in our lifetimes, probably not ever. It was always just a dream. People understand that, instinctively, in a way they never did in the 1960s, during Apollo. That’s why, I fear, they’re sick of spaceflight — Shuttle, the Station — and sick of the people who promote it.”
His words, though mildly expressed, seemed brutally hard. Benacerraf shivered, suddenly, despite the continuing warmth of the day. My God, she thought. He’s going to let it go. Is that what he’s brought me here to tell me?
Here in this nondescript wood, beside this slightly tacky memorial, she could be witnessing the death of the U.S. manned space program.
They turned and began to walk out of the wood, back towards the car.
“Why did you ask to see me, today? What do you want of me?”
“We’re going to be hit hard by Congress and the White House and the DoD over Columbia, Paula. Whatever I decide, I might not survive myself. And even if I do I’m going to have to shake up many levels of the management hierarchy, in all the centers. I’m trying to think ahead.
“I know I’m going to need someone to take over the Shuttle program. A fresh face. A management outsider, Paula, someone who’s untainted by all the NASA crap.”
She frowned. “You mean me?”
“You’ve the right qualifications, the right experience. I’ve watched how you’ve handled yourself in the fall-out from Columbia, and I’ve been impressed. And you have the right air of distance from the real insiders.”
She said, “My God. You’re asking me to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle program.”
“Mothballing, Paula. That’s the language we’ll use. Look, it’s an important job.”
“To you?”
He grinned. “Hell, yes, to me. What did you think I meant?”
“But what about all the other programs? The stuff you started after Chinese-Sputnik panic, the RLV initiatives…”
“Frankly,” Hadamard said, “I don’t much care. If some damn Shuttle II ever flies, it will be long after I’m out of the hot seat. And if it ever does fly you know Maclachlan will just shut it down, when he takes the White House. All that matters to me is how to use up the Shuttle technology. That project, unlike RLV, will come to fruition during my term.”
Benacerraf got it. It could be that a judicious, sensitively handled wind-down of Shuttle would be the criterion on which Hadamard would be judged: on which the rest of his career might depend.
“Sure. So what about the components? What do we do with the three remaining orbiters?”
“You’ve heard some of the suggestions. You’ll hear more. The dreamers at Marshall want to respond to the Chinese, to go to the Moon. As ever. The USAF want nuclear space battle stations, or to practise sub-orbital bomb runs over Moscow. The Navy want to use the birds as target practice. And so on.”
“Do you have a preference?”
“Only that whatever you come up with fits the mood.” He smiled sadly. “Anyhow, JSC could use a new lawn ornament. The one we have now is getting a little rusty.”
“I understand,” she said sourly.
Lawn ornaments. Jesus.
She did understand. Hadamard wanted her to guide what was left of the Shuttle program through the current panic about the Chinese, all the way to the usual run-down and cancellations that would follow.
But, she thought, maybe it didn’t have to be like that.
If she took this job, she would move into a position where she could make things happen.
And there are, she thought, other possibilities than turning spaceships into lawn ornaments. Even if doing anything constructive would mean battling past the opposition of a lot of interests, not least the USAF. And even if it would all, it seemed, have to be a race against time, ensuring that whatever was set up was in place before Congressman Xavier Maclachlan became President and had a chance to shoot it in the head…
It was a hell of a challenge. But suddenly dreams like Rosenberg’s didn’t seem so remote. Suddenly she was in a position to move proposals like that out of the realms of thought experiments, even make them happen.
They emerged into the bright sunlight of the field beyond the wood. In the distance, the children continued to play, their calls rising to the sky.
For the first time since hitting the dirt at Edwards, she felt her pulse pick up a beat of excitement.
She said to Hadamard, “I’ll do the job.” But, she thought, maybe not the way you expect me to.
* * *
On Monday morning she moved into her new office at JSC. She called in her secretary and asked him to set up a series of meetings. George, a sombre but competent young man with his hair woven into tight plaits, took notes and began his work.
She needed a team. So she made a list for George: Marcus White, the stranded Moonwalker; Barbara Fahy, the woman who had tried to bring Columbia home; the young Station astronauts Mott and Libet; Bill Angel, the nearest thing to a competent pilot she knew. And Isaac Rosenberg, the dreamer, the crazy man who wanted to go to Titan.
George went off to set up meetings.
After a few minutes, she called him back in.
“Look, George, things are going to start popping around here,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it
is right now, but I want you to keep a log of the people I talk to. And keep it in a secure directory.”
After all, she reflected, they could be making history here, in the next few weeks and months. Maybe historians of the future would care enough to understand how this decision had come about.
Or, she thought in her gloomier moments, not.
George seemed intrigued, but complied without questioning.
She got to work.
* * *
Rosenberg called Paula from Hobby Airport, ten miles south-east of downtown Houston. His plane, from Pasadena, had landed a half-hour late, after four in the afternoon.
“Get a cab to JSC,” she told him. “I’ll pick you up in my car at security.”
Rosenberg hadn’t been out this way before. He stood waiting by the security gate on NASA Road One, staring with undisguised curiosity at the ageing black-and-white buildings.
From JSC she drove east with the home-bound rush-hour traffic, further out from Houston, heading for Clear Lake.
Benacerraf said, “You ought to do the tourist bit, while you’re here. Space Center Houston. They’ve got a terrific Mars-walk immersive VR. I’m told.”
“I prefer RL.”
“RL?”
“You don’t get online much, do you?”
The road paralleled the north coast of Clear Lake, which was an inlet of Galveston Bay. They passed the glittering tower of the Nassau Bay Hilton, its glass walls coated with softscreen animated posters.
Rosenberg said, “We could be anywhere. Any coast area, anywhere. You wouldn’t think—”
“I know.” She stared at the shabby roadside buildings, the tough, scrub grass. “Erosion runs fast here,” she said. “And now that the space effort is receding—” and the wilder rumors now were that most of the NASA centers, JSC included, were to be mothballed “—all that erosion is going to have a field day. A hundred years from now, JSC will just be a cow pasture again.”
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