Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  The enhancements Rockwell had applied over the years had turned the basic configuration into a flexible, robust space truck. Outwardly the ship stuck nose first to the front of the Mission Module Docking Adapter looked much the same as every other Apollo which had ever flown: it was made up of the classic configuration, the cylindrical Service Module, with its big propulsion system engine bell stuck on the back, and the squat cone of the Command Module on top. But this Apollo — called a “Block V” design by the Rockwell engineers who had built her — was put together very differently from the early models, the old Block IIs, which had flown to the Moon in the 1960s, and even from the later Block III and IV Earth-orbital ferries.

  The first lunar missions had been only two weeks in length. But the Ares Apollo was going to have to survive eighteen months of soak in deep space. And the temperature extremes Apollo would endure, as Ares flew across the Solar System, were much greater than on any lunar flight. So most of Apollo’s main systems had been redesigned from the floor up.

  The Service Module had more reaction control gas and less main engine propellant. The old Service Modules had vented excess water, produced by the onboard batteries; the Ares model stored its water in tanks, to avoid having frozen ice particles drifting around near the cluster. The whole configuration had more batteries, and there was more stowage area and locker space in the Command Module. There was an atmosphere interchange duct in the upper docking assembly, to cycle air from the Mission Module into the Command Module. And so on.

  Reliability was essential on long-duration missions. Many of Apollo’s systems had redundant backups — straightforward copies, to be substituted in case of a failure — but the old triple-redundancy design paradigm they’d used to get to the Moon wouldn’t work, it had been found, on long-duration missions. Enough redundancy to achieve an acceptably low level of risk over such a span of time would have resulted in a spacecraft of immense weight and complexity.

  So the designers had gotten smarter. In addition to simple redundancy, some functions could be performed by dissimilar components, or by components from different subsystems, to reduce the chance of a single failure mode knocking out many functions altogether — as had happened in Apollo 13. And the maintenance capabilities of the crew weren’t ignored, either. The whole ship was more modular and accessible than in its first design, so that components could be reached, and repaired or replaced comparatively easily. There were also isolation valves, switches, test equipment, and fault diagnosis tools. Some of the components contained their own BITEs, microelectronic built-in self-test units.

  Hauling an Apollo all the way to Mars also provided some abort options. On return to Earth the Apollo, with the Mission Module, was due to be inserted into a highly elliptical orbit around the planet: two hundred by a hundred thousand miles, a swooping curve that would take the stack halfway out to the Moon and back, an orbit accessible to Ares at a relatively low expenditure of fuel. The Command Module would be able to take them down to the surface of Earth from such a trajectory; the reentry heating would be less than a return from the Moon. And if Apollo were to fail, the crew could survive in its high orbit until rescue came, in the form of another five-man stretched Apollo.

  If they couldn’t make Earth orbit at all — for instance if the J-2S, the single engine of the final MS-IVB booster stage, were to fail — they could attempt a direct entry from the interplanetary coast. The heat shield on the Command Module’s underside had been thickened and toughened up, so that it would at least give them a fighting chance of surviving a direct reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The velocity would only be around 15 percent faster than a lunar return.

  And, if the Mission Module’s life support were to fail in-flight, it would even be possible for the crew to retreat to the Command Module and use it as a shelter. A lifeboat. Just then, with Gershon alone in it, the Command Module seemed pretty roomy; it wasn’t like that with three of them aboard, and things would be pretty tough if they had to spend weeks, or even months, cooped up in there.

  But it was better than dying.

  Every aspect of the mission had been designed with failures in mind, to give options at every point, to leave no “dead zones” where there was no abort capability. The designers had almost succeeded.

  Gershon hummed along with Mozart as he worked.

  This fifty-day checkup was a chore, of course, but everything on the fucking flight was a chore for Gershon. And it was the same on every long-duration spaceflight.

  Gershon’s moment was going to come when he took that MEM down through the thin air of Mars itself. But he’d basically be working at peak effectiveness for, what? — forty, fifty minutes? — out of a flight that was going to last a year and a half. Not much of a payload ratio, Ralph. But that was okay. It was a bargain that Gershon was prepared to accept. Because there he was, on an odyssey to Mars.

  The first time he’d come across the name “Ares” had been in a battered old book he’d picked up from a dime store in Mason. It was a collection of science-fiction stories, by someone called Stanley Weinbaum. The title story was “A Martian Odyssey,” and it featured a ship called Ares and four men exploring the surface of an exotic, mysterious Mars. Weinbaum’s magical words were alive in his memory, still, after all those years; it was as if he could feel the stiff, yellowing pages of that battered old paperback in his hands.

  When he’d heard they were going to use Weinbaum’s name for the mission, Gershon had whooped.

  He’d worked his way through the science-fiction canon as he grew older, and he’d ridden many other ships to Mars. Bradbury had been elusive, with his hinting descriptions of silver locusts — pulsing with fire, swarming with men — falling to the surface of a beautiful, inhabited planet. Clarke’s Ares, on the other hand, had been described in great detail. It was a dumbbell shape of two huge spheres, separated by a hundred yards of tubeway. The rear contained atomic motors — serviced by AEC robots — and the leading sphere was living quarters, with cabins and a huge dining room and an observation gallery…

  Sitting in the canvas frame couch, Gershon sucked some more juice out of his tube and ran his hand over the surface of the grimy instrument panel before him. He grinned. Dining rooms, huh.

  Gershon thought of Apollo technology the way, he supposed, other guys might think of classic cars. Like a Corvette, maybe. Apollo was a beautiful machine, and it worked, and it had achieved great things. And even after all those years it was still better than anything the Russians could put up…

  And it seemed entirely appropriate to him that the first mission to Mars — for real — should be conducted not in some lost von Braun-type dream of the 1950s, but in a handful of strung-together Apollo-application cans.

  Still, he knew that this voyage was a fulfillment of more dreams than just his own. As Ares followed its long, spiraling trajectory to Mars, he felt that it wasn’t alone: it was accompanied by a fleet of ghostly ships, huge silver forms, from the pages of Clarke and Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury and Burroughs…

  The Mozart floated around the cabin, and Gershon worked patiently through his checklist.

  Book Three

  APOLLO-N

  Friday, November 28, 1980

  APOLLO-N; LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

  Rolf Donnelly swung his car into his space outside Building 30, the Mission Control Center. He got out, whistling.

  There was a new sign up, in a parking space close to the building: MCC M O EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. Donnelly laughed. Welcome to government work! You’re in Mission Control, and your prize for a good job well-done is the loan of a parking space!

  He took a breath of the muggy autumn air. It would be his last fresh air for a while; one of the few things he didn’t like about working in Building 30 was that it was completely enclosed. He walked slowly by the big air-conditioning grilles on the outside of the building; in the spring, birds nested in there, but he couldn’t see any activity.

  Donnelly was still whist
ling as he turned into the building. He was a flight director, and he was going to be lead flight for the Apollo-N mission. And he loved his job.

  The big display screens at the front of the room bore spectacular images from Kennedy, of climbing metal, billowing smoke, flames as bright as the sun.

  The Saturn VN lifted smoothly off the pad.

  A few seconds into the Apollo-N flight, the Mission Operations Control Room was an amphitheater of calm, of control, of patient work. From his position in the command and control row of the MOCR, third from the front, Donnelly could see everything: the rows of blocky benches, the workstations with their clumsy old CRTs and keyboards bolted into place, manned by the controllers that made up his flight team. Indigo Team. The workstations were littered with ring binders of mission rules, polystyrene coffee cups, yellow notepads.

  On the brown-painted walls there were mission patches, dating all the way back to Gemini 4; and there were plaques, framed in the team colors of retired flight directors. There was a big Stars and Stripes at the front of the room. The light was low, the colors gloomy; but the CRTs glowed brightly.

  The booster passed the launch tower. And, smoothly, Indigo Team took control of the mission from the Kennedy Firing Room.

  Donnelly could feel adrenaline surge in his system.

  “Roll and pitch program,” Chuck Jones called down on the air-to-ground loop. His voice was shaking, barely audible to Donnelly. “Everything’s looking good. The sky is getting lighter.”

  The Saturn VN pitched itself over, arcing east over the Atlantic. The booster was flying itself, gimbaling its engines so that it neatly followed its preprogrammed trajectory; the members of the crew, Jones, Priest, and Dana, were passengers, their nuclear rocket just payload.

  Natalie York, capcom for the shift, called up to the spacecraft. “Apollo, Houston… You’re right smack-dab on the trajectory.”

  “Roger, Houston. This baby is really going.”

  “Roger, that.”

  Numbers scrolled across CRT screens, and Donnelly’s team talked quietly to each other on their comms loops.

  It was York’s first assignment as capcom. She sounded calm, controlled; Donnelly was pleased.

  The flight was going well. Rolf Donnelly could feel it. He didn’t have to do a thing.

  There were a lot of unique features about this mission. It was the first time the U.S. had tried to maintain two ambitious flights at once, with no less than six astronauts above the atmosphere: Jones, Dana, and Priest climbing to orbit for their NERVA test flight on top of the Saturn VN, and Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone already out in lunar orbit in Moonlab, waiting for their rendezvous with the Russians. It was also the first time NASA had operated both its MOCRs at once.

  And this was, of course, the first manned flight of the S-NB, the new Saturn booster third stage with its NERVA 2 nuclear engine.

  Management Row, behind Donnelly in the MOCR, was full today. For instance, there was Bert Seger, just over Donnelly’s shoulder, his trademark carnation a glare of white. And in the Viewing Room behind the glass wall at the back of the MOCR, Donnelly had spotted Fred Michaels himself, puffing on one of his cigars, watching the numbers unroll with baffled anxiety. This was a very important, and very public, flight.

  But Donnelly wasn’t concerned; not now. He had a lot of faith in his people. The controllers in this room were actually leaders of the teams, three or five strong, who worked in the back rooms clustered around the MOCR; to get as far as this room, the controllers had had to work in the back rooms on a good number of missions. That was the way Donnelly had come up himself. The controllers would often get poached away by the higher salaries offered by the aerospace companies: a spell in Mission Control looked good on your resume. But that was all right; it kept down the average age in here.

  Anyway, Donnelly had no such ambitions. The MOCR was much closer to the center of gravity of decision making, on any flight they’d launched to date, even than being in the cabin of the actual spacecraft. This was where things were run; in this room, Donnelly was in control. As far as he was concerned, it was better than flying.

  One minute into the flight.

  The vibrations of the launch smoothed out. We are outpacing sound itself, Jim Dana thought.

  “You know,” Jones shouted, “there’s something…”

  Ben Priest yelled back. “What?”

  “This goddamn bird doesn’t ring right…”

  Dana, staring at the panel before him, couldn’t see Jones’s face inside his helmet.

  There wasn’t time to think about it. Gs were piling on Dana, as the five heavy engines of the S-IC stage continued to blast. Two, three, four Gs… he could feel his chest flattening.

  But that was about as bad as it would get. In fact, the Gs were oddly reassuring. They were coming right on schedule. Maybe Jones was wrong. So far this was just like the sims. Almost.

  Suddenly he was thrown forward against his seat restraints. What the…? The smooth buildup was gone. Could an engine have failed? But then he was hurled back, deeper into his couch; and then forward again, so hard he could feel his straps bruise his stomach and chest through the suit’s layers. Then back again -

  “Pogoing!” Jones shouted. “Hang on to your hats, guys.”

  The vibrations, forward and back, were coming at the rate of five or six a second, and their violence was astonishing. How many Gs? And oscillating all the time -

  Dana could no longer see; the craft was a blur around him, and he felt as if he was being pummeled about the chest, head, and legs. We’ll have to abort. We can’t survive this. It’ll shake us to pieces. He tried to turn his head, to see if Jones was reaching for his abort handle.

  The pogoing didn’t show up in the MOCR.

  To the controllers there, the first-stage burn looked nominal. It was only apparent in the Marshall engineers’ equivalent of Mission Control, called the Huntsville Operations Support Center.

  On a closed loop from Marshall, a warning was whispered to Mike Conlig. “The S-IC is pogoing. The accelerometers are showing plus or minus eight Gs.”

  Conlig was sitting at the left-hand end of the Trench — the front row of the MOCR at Houston — working as the Booster controller for this launch, with special responsibility for the new NERVA stage. The pogo had to be occurring because the natural vibration of the thrust chambers of the F-1 engines was close, somehow, to the structural vibration of the stack as a whole. Christ, he thought. But we put in absorbers to de-tune the vehicle, this shouldn’t be happening. Evidently those assholes at Marshall hadn’t done enough resonance testing on the new Saturn VN stack, with its nuclear third stage. We could lose the mission because of this.

  He prepared to report to Flight.

  But the whisper from Huntsville came through again. “Amplitude diminishing.”

  Conlig held his breath and waited.

  The pogoing faded, as suddenly as it had begun.

  By comparison, the steady pressure of three or four Gs on Dana’s chest was a welcome relief.

  He saw the mission clock, hovering before him. Ten seconds. That’s all it was. Ten seconds.

  He turned his head to see the others; there was a zone of blackness around his vision. He focused on Chuck Jones’s face. “Chuck? Ben? Are you okay?”

  Jones’s hand was closed tight around the abort handle; Dana wondered what effort of will it had taken to keep from turning it. Jones said, “Houston, we’ve been a-pogoing. But we is still here, like three dried peas in a tin can.”

  “Roger.” Natalie York sounded puzzled. It was possible the Houston people didn’t know, yet, what the crew had gone through. They didn’t see the accelerometer readouts. Dana just hoped they were watching the rest of the telemetry.

  But then the events of the launch sequence came rushing on them. “Three minutes,” Jones called. “Get set for staging, boys.”

  Dana shook his head, and the darkness at the edge of his vision began to disperse. He thought uneasily of the
additional stress the staging would place on the pogo-rattled S-NB.

  Rolf Donnelly had not enjoyed the pogoing. He had also not enjoyed not knowing about it until the crew’s verbal report came through.

  At this stage of the flight, the Marshall people were more or less in control; they had the best understanding of the status of their bird. But I don’t know why we didn’t abort during that damn pogo. They must be really keen to get their nuclear stage into orbit.

  Ascent to orbit was always the most difficult and dangerous phase of a mission: the phase when a hell of a lot of energy was being expended to get those tons of metal up to an orbital speed of five miles per second. Reentry was infinitely easier since you could dissipate all that energy at your leisure. Ascent was the phase when you were buying the most risk, the phase when Donnelly always braced himself for problems.

  He felt he needed more control than he’d had on this flight so far.

  The trouble was, the Marshall Germans had developed their skills in an era of automated, unmanned vehicles. You couldn’t send a command to a V-2 once it was off the pad. And the thought of trying to control a bird in flight was still alien to them. So the Germans had done their best to turn their controllers, the people involved, into robots — extensions of the machine. Don’t improvise. Be disciplined. Follow the book, you’re paid to react, not to think.

  Donnelly made a silent vow that he would campaign to have procedures changed. He didn’t want to be put in the position of having to trust the judgment of the Marshall people again.

  Still — although the Saturn was riding a little above its planned path, on the big trajectory plot at the front of the room — the crew seemed to have ridden out the pogo, and the booster’s telemetry looked nominal. The stack had survived its first staging, the discarding of the spent S-IC, and the second-stage burn looked smooth.

  Maybe we’ll get away with this…

  Donnelly could feel a pressure on his back. There were men in that Viewing Room, among the VIPs and celebrities and headquarters people and politicians and crew families, who would know things were going wrong. There was Fred Michaels himself, with his nose practically pressed up against the glass. And beside Michaels was Gregory Dana, Jim’s father. Donnelly didn’t know Dana senior personally, but he understood he was some kind of mission specialist from Langley. The pressure exerted by the man was worse even than anything induced by the presence of Michaels. Goddamn it, that’s my son up there.