Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  In it, six extremely complicated machines would meet for the first time; none would ever have been in proximity to any other, and not until they were intricately fitted together, with each bolt and wire in one component interfacing with its mate in another, could the spacecraft be said to be in existence. One workman had calculated that some 22,000 joinings had to be completed, tested and approved before Apollo 18 became a whole.

  The constructors of this giant machine, working in six widely separated sections of the nation, required 30,000 different complex documents to ensure congruent fittings from one manufacturer to the next. The massive Stage I was put together in Louisiana by Boeing; the powerful Stage II was built in California by North American; Stage III, containing the crucial single engine which would send the spacecraft toward the Moon, once it got aloft, was built in a different part of California by Douglas. And the instrument unit, built by IBM in Alabama, was so huge and complicated that one traditional engineer said, ‘That had to be built by some kid with an Erector set.’

  Those four basic parts comprised only the rocket, but the process was the same for the two craft in which the astronauts would actually fly. Their command and service module was built in Downey, California, by an independent branch of North American and was broken down into two intricately related parts: the command module in which the men lived, and the service module which kept most of the gear out of the way. The astronauts considered this a single unit, the CSM, and spent days in its simulator, for upon it they must depend. The lunar module in which two of the men would drop down to the Moon and fly back to the orbiting CSM was built on Long Island by Grumman.

  It was a preposterous way to construct one of the most intricate machines ever devised by man, for no one could predict whether the system would work until the six pieces—seven, really—were assembled in the waiting cube on the Florida swamplands. As Randy Claggett said irreverently, while orbiting his first Apollo when his companions were walking on the Moon, ‘Here I am tooling along in a machine with four million different parts, each one supplied by the lowest bidder.’

  And how did NASA bring these widely separated items together at the Cape? The instrument unit was placed on a barge on the Tennessee River, sent north to the Ohio River, then floated down the Mississippi, and around the southern tip of Florida to Canaveral. Stage I followed the same route, starting at New Orleans. California forwarded its segments two ways: by ship through the Panama Canal and by a huge Boeing Stratocruiser converted into what NASA people called our ‘Pregnant Guppy’; its belly could accommodate a completed Stage III.

  In fact, NASA was in the transportation business with a fleet of five full-time vessels, one Pregnant Guppy and innumerable T-38s.

  Claggett’s Apollo 18 was scheduled to lift off on 23 April 1973, and as soon as the time was announced, Randy endeared himself to the press by saying, offhand, ‘What a lucky date for us. Shakespeare’s birthday. If he was alive today, he’d write a play about it. “The still-vext Bermoothes.” ’

  ‘That’s from The Tempest, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘How do you happen to know that?’

  ‘They learn us things at Texas A and M,’ and on the spur of the moment he told the reporters of an elderly man who taught Freshman Lit: ‘He said, “It don’t matter whether you remember anythin’ else, but please, each year, remember that April 23 is the birthday of one of the noblest minds that ever existed, and pay him homage.” Some smart ass—’

  ‘Scrub that!’ Tucker Thompson cried.

  ‘Some wise guy said, “But I thought everyone knew Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays,” and the old gentleman never batted an eyelash, just said, “Then for the love of God celebrate Bacon’s birthday, but at least once in your narrow, cornfed lives, pay respect to someone bigger than you are.” And he took us all to a saloon and treated us to ale, which he said was what Shakespeare drank.’

  The six components had to reach the assembly building four months prior to launch, and it was an exciting Christmastime when the barges came up the canal and the gigantic airplanes dropped down with their precious cargoes. Engineering teams from each contractor’s home office arrived for extended duty at Canaveral, responsible for seeing that their part of the system functioned, and for three months the meticulous work proceeded as the disparate units were introduced one to the other and fitted together.

  In February, Senator Grant and his committee factotum, Penny Pope, visited the assembly building to compile figures for presentation to the Senate budget officials, and for the last time in the Apollo program they watched the intricate labor being done in the assembly building. Grant was not unhappy to see the vast program grinding to a halt. It had been necessary in its day, to remind the Russians and the rest of the world that America was still competent, but the last few missions had been merely flourishes, and he knew it. However, this farewell flight, to the other side of the Moon, was going to be a dandy: ‘We’re going out with an appropriate bang.’ He then handed the press a statement containing statistics collected by Mrs. Pope:

  In mounting this tremendous effort to overtake the Russians, our nation has not stinted, and when we observe this vast assembly of buildings, what we see is the imaginative effort a free nation can make when it feels itself under the gun. Cost of the land, 140,000 acres at $72,000,000. Cost of the shell of this magnificent building in which we meet, $89,000,000. Cost of the equipment inside, $63,000,000.

  Look at that supertractor on which Apollo will be carried to its launch site, $11,000,000, and we must have an extra for backup. Total cost of ground installations alone, $800,000,000. Number of persons working here, 26,500. Number of high-powered experts needed to supervise the forthcoming launch, 500 here, another 1,500 in Houston.

  The statement then dealt with support systems elsewhere in America and around the world, relying on such estimates as local officials could provide:

  Number of radio ships dispersed around the world, four. Number of communications aircraft in flight during an Apollo mission, five. Number of ground stations in various foreign countries, thirteen. Number of eligible target ships positioned in various oceans, seven. Total number of men and women involved one way or another in this mission, 450,000. Total number of men who will finally stand on the Moon, two.

  However, despite the staggering cost, this senator is more than pleased with the results of our national effort. He is especially gratified by the caliber of astronauts who will fly this final mission. He has known Captain John Pope, USN, all the latter’s life and considers him one of the finest young men our nation has produced. His commander, Colonel Claggett of the Marines, has already flown three times in space, with outstanding results. But he is particularly honored that the third crew member is the nephew of a man he had the honor of serving with at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Dr. Gawain Butler, Superintendent of Schools in Mesa County, California. As our first black astronaut, Dr. Paul Linley occupies a proud niche in our program.

  His final paragraph summarized this thinking, and although Mrs. Pope urged him to soften it, he refused, reminding her: “You’re loyal to your husband, as you should be, but I must be loyal to the nation as a whole.’

  It is appropriate now for the United States to wind down this extremely costly adventure, which was amply justified in 1957 when Sputnik invaded our skies but which has trailed off into mere exhibitionism. We’ve reached the Moon. With this daring voyage we shall explore its dark side. Now we must direct our attention to equally pressing problems here on Earth.

  In mid-February the experts in the vast assembly building reported: ‘All okay’—and this became the signal to initiate an operation of ponderous elegance, one which always caused gasps of approval from the hordes of visitors allowed to watch from a safe distance. The gigantic doors of the building drew aside, 456 feet tall, to reveal, standing erect inside in the darkness, a gleaming white masterpiece, heavy at the bottom but tapering to a delicate point 363 feet in the air. The simplicity of th
e streamlined exterior, each surface honed smooth, belied the extreme complexity within, and often at this moment of revelation watchers applauded.

  Through the vast doors they could see that the Apollo had been assembled attached to a massive gantry, both structures resting on a heavy metal base supported by pillars which kept them well above the floor, and now the tremendous supertractor—each of its four sets of what should have been normal cleats being individual tractors of gigantic size—moved from its waiting place outside the building, up a gentle gradient, and right into the heart of the building. There it eased its way under the waiting spacecraft, activated its hydraulic lifts, and tenderly assumed control of the entire mighty structure, Apollo and gantry alike.

  At that moment even the workmen cheered, but now a most difficult problem arose. Tractor-plus-Apollo-plus-gantry weighed 18,480,000 pounds—9,240 tons—and how could such a burden be moved three and a half miles across Florida swampland?

  ‘What we did was call in the best roadbuilders in the world, and they said, “Simple. You build a road wider than an eight-lane superhighway. You go down nine feet, line the bottom of your trench with big rocks, then seven feet of aggregate, then eight inches of pebbles. Cost? We can do it for about $20,000,000.” ’

  Gingerly, the massive tractor and its precious cargo edged its way out of the assembly building, down the incline and onto the waiting roadbed, where its four corner tractors, each carrying more than 2,000 tons, ground into the surface and inched its way along.

  It required a crew of fifteen to operate it at a speed of not quite a mile an hour, but when it came out into the February sunlight, moving purposefully like some majestic dinosaur, watchers cheered as the great thing went past: ‘It moves fast enough to do the job.’

  Slow, vast, creaking, grinding its massive cleats into the especially hard pebbles imported from Alabama, it carried on its back the soaring white Apollo nestled into the even taller launching gantry that would keep everything in order until the moment of launching: ‘There she goes! Destination Moon!’

  As gently as if it were carrying the child Moses along a canal of rushes, the supertractor moved out toward Complex 39, where the launch would be made, and as it passed majestically through the Florida sunshine, three men watched with special interest, for they would ride inside the capsule mounted at the top; they would guide this exquisitely beautiful thing to the other side of the Moon. ‘The last and the best,’ Claggett said.

  John Pope, still amazed by the actual size of this giant, whispered, ‘It’s a privilege to be associated with it,’ and Claggett reminded him, ‘You named it, son. There goes your Altair.’ This would be their home, their responsibility, the last noble bird of its breed, and they watched with love as it crept along. ‘It wants to fly,’ Randy said. Twenty-five thousand miles an hour, not crawl at twenty inches a second.’

  After it had traveled three very slow miles, the importance of the top eight inches of pebbled rock and sealer became evident, for now the crawler was required to take a smooth curve to the north, and if the surface had been concrete, or macadam, as originally planned, the twisting of the cleats would have torn the road to pieces. As it was, the tremendous torque pulverized the top pebbles, but the metallic beetle inched ahead.

  When it reached the approach to Pad A, from which the rocket would be fired, it faced a five-degree ramp up which it must move to the launch position, and now a score of computers, pumps, hydraulic systems and controls sprang into operation, lowering the front end of the crawler and raising the back so that an absolutely level platform was maintained.

  When the climb up the ramp was completed, the crawler delivered the great Apollo with its gantry to the proper point, lowered it onto its stand, then backed slowly away as if it were some fairytale bullfrog who had saved a princess. Job done, it retreated groaningly back across the marshes, never again to bring a gleaming Apollo from its place of birth.

  Among the 450,000 persons who were more or less directly responsible for the success of Apollo 18, including the Australians, Madagascans, Spaniards, Guamanians, Antiguans and Ascension Islanders who manned stations at their various locations, was a crew-cut Colorado farm boy from the little village of Buckingham in the drylands. An astronomer since his ninth birthday, when an uncle gave him Japanese binoculars and the Norton Star Atlas, he had won a scholarship to the agricultural college at Fort Collins, where like so many of the support team, he had graduated with honors.

  His name was Sam Cottage, and his parents, immigrants from the German settlements along the Volga River in Russia, had worried about what kind of job their son could land with only a degree in astronomy, but he surprised them by quickly finding work at the Sun Study Center in Boulder, where high in the clear air of the Rockies, he studied the Sun. It was his responsibility, four times an hour, to focus his sixteen-inch solar-patrol telescope, with its special filter and obscuring disk, to see if any flares had arisen anywhere on the visible side of the Sun or along its perimeter, throwing disturbances a hundred thousand miles into the air; and then, through a restricted lens and carefully darkened eyepiece, to record patiently any spots which might have appeared on the surface of the Sun itself. Special attention had to be paid to regions that might conceivably erupt later into major flares which would produce what astronomers called solar proton events.

  The United States government judged it profitable to keep Sam Cottage at such work because the significance of sunspots was just beginning to be appreciated: they caused northern lights, which sometimes halted radio transmission; they seemed to disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field; and what was of great importance now, they had the capacity to launch a particularly vigorous flare which would discharge a dose of radiation so powerful as to be lethal to any human being caught unprotected. That was why Dr. Feldman, NASA’s medical expert on radiation, had been so eager to have Claggett and Pope retrieve that dosimeter from the flank of Agena-A during their Gemini flight: ‘We needed to know how much radiation accumulates during a long flight.’

  Astronomers had to be consulted before the schedule of any flight could be fixed, because only they could say that the timing within the sunspot cycle was favorable. Spots had been meticulously counted since the year 1843, when astronomers first became aware that they varied within an eleven-year cycle, and these cycles had been numbered, so that Apollo 18 would lift off during the fading years of Cycle 20. This cycle had begun with a marked low in 1964, had achieved a below-average peak in 1970, and was now in swift decline, but as Cottage’s office warned NASA:

  Even in the latest stages of a cycle, there is always a possibility of an unexpected solar proton event which might cause you to abandon a mission if it were still on the ground or terminate it if in flight, but Cycle 20 has been notably less violent than Cycle 19, which produced a heavy concentration of flares in 1957. We judge you can proceed with your plans for Apollo 18 with some feeling of security, but we shall maintain a close watch on the Sun’s behavior.

  So each day young Cottage compiled four reports on what the surface appeared to be doing, and at the close of day helped prepare a summary to be distributed to interested observers throughout the world.

  In his spare time Cottage pursued advanced studies with a man who knew as much about the Sun as anyone on Earth, a soft-spoken Ph.D. named Jack Eddy, who worked atop a spacious hill outside Boulder in a research unit operated by a consortium of American universities. Cottage had been advised by one of his superiors: ‘There won’t be many advancements in our field for a young man who has only a B.S. degree. You’re bright. Get your master’s and then a doctorate.’ He was now working with Eddy, through the University of Colorado, for his master’s, and he was struck by the imaginative work his professor had done in reconstructing the life history of the Sun through the last three thousand years. As Sam told the coed from Wyoming he was dating:

  ‘This guy Eddy is fantastic. He’s reviewed every study ever made about the Sun since we’ve had writing, and even some lik
e tree rings that don’t require writing. There was this guy Maunder at the end of the last century who claimed that in the late 1600s sunspots almost disappeared for a period of seventy years. People laughed, but Eddy proved that Maunder was right. That was the age of bitter cold on Earth. Glaciers edging down.

  ‘The Maunder Minimum was a real thing. I suppose in the centuries ahead we’ll have other minimums, but right now I’m trying to predict what will happen from year to year, and I’m getting nowhere.’

  He had an affinity for mathematics, and under Eddy’s guidance, had compiled mounds of data which he ran through the computer, satisfying himself but not others that over long stretches of time the Sun’s activity balanced out and that a minimum of energy here was corrected by an abundance later on. He was convinced that the significant cycle was really twenty-two years and not eleven, for during the first half the magnetic character of sunspot regions followed one pattern, reversing during the second half. He was also much impressed by studies from Germany indicating that a superior cycle of eighty-eight years might be operating, but whatever he did, whatever theory he followed, his statistics showed that Cycle 20 was grossly aberrant and could be brought back into balance only if a major proton event erupted in these dying days of its existence.

  Daily he gazed at the Sun’s impassive face, trying to deduce what was happening there, but he could discover nothing, so he returned to his piles of data with what was almost anger, for he knew they were hiding information, if only he could unravel it.

  In some irritation he telephoned Dr. Eddy, but found him unavailable; he was at Kitt Peak in Arizona pursuing his own studies. So Sam was left alone with his data, and late one night he left his work and wandered to the dormitory where his Wyoming girl friend slept and rousted her from bed by throwing pebbles at her window: ‘No matter what cycle I use, eleven years, twenty-two or eighty-eight, I keep reaching the conclusion that we’re due for a really major event.’