Eight months after the accident, the commission made its report. Less than twenty pages of that report dealt with the accident and its causes; they said only that the SSMEs were getting old and had to be run at very high power, and it wasn’t altogether surprising that the technology that had stretched the envelope in 1975 wasn’t completely up to the challenge twenty-seven years later. A new program was needed—first a way to use off-the-shelf equipment to keep operating in space, because we could no longer afford the kind of shutdown that had happened after Challenger; then a conservatively designed, proven-technology replacement for the shuttles; then systematic movement toward better long-range solutions.
Luckily for the commission, the president, and NASA, all of the pieces for such a program were there already, not so much by design as by good luck. The worldwide space doldrums of the 1990s had allowed large quantities of unrealized designs and ideas, and underused hardware, to accumulate, and the Russian need for hard cash plus their decade of experience working with American companies had brought some of that hardware to a high degree of reliability. Thus the new plan could be presented as making maximum use of off-the-shelf technology and offering relatively few new risks.
Foremost of these opportunities was the remarkable Zenit, a workhorse rocket that Boeing was making under license from the Russian and Ukrainian firms that had privatized it. The Zenit had been originally intended as a strap-on booster for Energiya, the giant Russian booster rocket. Boeing had found another use for the Zenit in sea launches from a floating oil-drilling platform, where it had also performed well.
The Zenit was rugged and simple in design, and in particular its engines, once they were being made by Pratt and Whitney with better-quality Western materials, were simple, efficient, powerful, and cheap. Boeing had enhanced the Zenit further by creating the “Starbooster”—a standard Zenit first stage, surrounded by a shell equipped with fixed wings, a V-tail, landing gear pods, and two off-the-shelf, high-reliability fan-jet engines (the same model that had flown in the 737 for decades) in the nose. The Starbooster was the first really reusable rocket booster: when the fuel in the first stage burned out, the heat shield built into the shell allowed a Starbooster to return to the lower atmosphere without burning up, and the engine and wings allowed robot systems to fly it back to its base. Whereas the shuttle boosters had to be parachuted into the sea, fished out, and reconditioned after a dunking in saltwater, the Starbooster flew back to a runway and could be rolled straight to the mechanics. Turnaround on reconditioning and reflying the solid fuel booster was measured in months; for the Starbooster, in days.
The commission had first considered the possibility of upgrading the shuttle by replacing each of the solid rockets with a “Twin Starbooster”— two Zenits in the same shell, with a “scissor wing” that folded against the body like closing scissors for launch and reentry, then unfolded for flyback. This gave better streamlining and performance on liftoff, made for an easier reentry from the higher flights that the twin engines allowed it to achieve, and most importantly, created a configuration big enough to do the job formerly done by America’s aging fleet of disposable Titans and Atlases—early 1960s technology that was still in use forty years later—and be much cheaper than the Air Force’s proposed EELV (Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle), then being proposed for the same purpose.
Boeing had also pointed out that if you used Twin Starboosters on the shuttle, it would more than replace the dangerous solid fuel boosters—so much so that you could run shuttle main engines at well below 100 percent, gaining greater performance while avoiding both “Challenger-class” and “Endeavour-class” disasters.
But the commission noted with some regret that the time to do that had been some years ago; the shuttles were now getting old, nearing the end of their usable lives, and a better shuttle booster could only help the system limp a little faster. Ten years before, with four shuttles flying and the prospect of keeping them operating for a long time, two Twin Starboosters on each shuttle would have greatly enhanced capability and reduced cost; now it was an idea whose time had come and gone. The Starbooster had many uses, and it was a good idea to make use of it; the Twin Starbooster would simply go to the museum with all the other valid ideas that get bypassed on the road to the future.
Rather, they suggested, the thing to do was to concentrate on three problems:
• How can we get people and supplies to orbit at acceptable cost and safety, ASAP?
• How can we use the best of three decades of well-proven technology to create a certain-to-work low cost shuttle replacement?
• How can we eventually achieve the best possible space program combining what we can afford to pay and what we need to do?
Boeing had lost out on the bid for the EELV, but Boeing management had felt very strongly that there should be a market for their simple, proven-technology booster—putting one or two Space Shuttle Main Engines, with their more-than-twenty-year track record, directly under a large hydrogen/oxygen tank (derived from the shuttle’s external tank with minimal modifications), and equipping it with the bare bones of guidance systems and a payload rack on top. The idea was that such a lightweight gadget—it was practically all engine and fuel—equipped with a good booster, would easily put itself into orbit. The reusable engines could be loaded into a shuttle cargo bay or otherwise wrapped up in a heat shield to bring back to Earth; the tank could stay up there to be used for construction. They had dubbed this simple, effective rocket the Centurion.
The prospect of sending large, empty pressure vessels into space for use there, as a side benefit to their use as boosters, led the commission to endorse the idea that NASA and the aerospace companies called the “HT Option” and everyone else called “the Big Can.” HT stood for “hydrogen tank.”
The idea was to make an advantage out of something that had always been a little bit of a problem. Liquid hydrogen burned with liquid oxygen has the highest specific impulse of any ordinary chemical rocket fuel. The higher the specific impulse, the more push you get per pound you have to lift (and the faster the rocket is at burnout velocity, the speed it is moving when the last of its fuel is gone). So liquid hydrogen was obviously the fuel of choice for space launches.
Unfortunately, it is also one of the least dense liquids known; it takes up a great deal of volume for a small weight. Liquid oxygen is denser than water; a pint of it weighs a bit over eighteen ounces. But a pint of liquid hydrogen—taking up just as much space—weighs barely more than one ounce. Thus most of the space taken up by fuel tanks was taken up by liquid hydrogen; the gigantic tank on the side of the space shuttle, for example, was mostly liquid hydrogen.
The sheer bulkiness of hydrogen had always been an annoyance to designers—until now, when it was realized that an empty hydrogen tank was a perfectly good pressure vessel, and that once its contents had been drained, you could simply put racks inside it, attach life support and other equipment to those racks, repressurize it with air, and have a workable habitat for human crews. It wasn’t even a hassle to get the last of the hydrogen out—all you needed to do was open it to space while the tank was in sunlight, and the liquid hydrogen would boil away, leaving the tank completely clean (liquid hydrogen isn’t sticky and it boils at very low temperatures). And for many missions the tank went to orbit anyway; being able to use it as a habitat would be just a matter of giving it an extra boost and putting it into a specific orbit. Best of all, once you selected the technique for converting tanks into habitats, you could have about as many habitats in orbit as you wanted to launch; the unit cost of carrying the tank up to orbit, plus outfitting it with racks and supplies, would be far below that for custom-built space stations. And besides, the idea of reusing something that was already going to orbit anyway wasn’t new—America’s first space station, the Skylab of the late 1970s, had been the upper stage of a Saturn 1-B.
In fact, the commission pointed out, to get a quick replacement for the U.S. Hab, as long as you were going to be making Centurio
n tanks, you might as well just take one of the tanks, modify it to attach to the ISS’s node, put the racks and equipment into it on the Earth where working conditions were so much easier, and then let a Centurion, assisted by a strapped-on Starbooster, heave it up to a rendezvous with the ISS.
Congressional critics of NASA, and those who wished to discontinue the space program, generally conceded that Starboosters, Centurions, and Big Cans were reasonable enough ideas, and that if the space program had to be conducted at all, it might as well be conducted with those, which was to say cheaply. Thus, those parts of the commission’s report were not really controversial; neither was the next part, which dealt with the problem of coming up with a suitable crew compartment to fly on top of a Centurion/Starbooster combination. As the commission pointed out, their solution involved spending no American money for development of new technologies, but only to purchase a well-established and tested product—and one that many Americans would be happy to see used again.
Using an enlarged Apollo II capsule, with its strong reminder of NASA’s glory days, was about as close to a public relations winner as NASA could manage at the time. And speaking now, from the other end of my life, the decision to buy them then was to have a profound effect on me, for the Apollo II—later to be nicknamed the Pigeon by pilots who had grown to love it—was one of the great workhorses of space, a ship so useful that nowadays it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have thought of going into space without it.
Though the Apollo II came by its legitimate name honestly enough, its lineage was still confusing and strange. Back before it had become clear that the Nixon Administration was going to shut down the moon landing program permanently, just as soon as they possibly could, Rockwell, the primary contractor for the Apollo capsule, had designed a bigger, more capable six-person version. The plan languished, but never quite died, after NASA committed to the Space Shuttle.
It survived because for so many years there were a variety of plans for the American space station, and one overriding political necessity: if anything went wrong aboard the space station, there had to be a credible way to return the crew to the Earth’s surface. Hence there was a need for an “ACRV”—an “Assured Crew Return Vehicle”—which could be moored permanently at the space station, so that, if necessity should arise, the crew could climb into it and make a safe return to Earth. Apollo II was a workable idea for an ACRV; it was a simple, rugged, proven technology that could get people from orbit to Earth.
Apollo II very nearly did die when ESA, the European Space Agency, proposed to be the primary builder of the ACRV. Their version, hastily redubbed the Crew Transfer Vehicle (CTV), to downplay its emergency function and emphasize its role as “Europe’s spaceship,” would have been an upgraded Soyuz, and for almost two years it looked as if Apollo II would pass into the technological neverland of the thousands of workable ideas that are proposed and developed but never built.
Then in August 1995, budgetary reality stepped in and started the chain reaction that led to Apollo II. ESA was on an even tighter budget than NASA; they had proposed, originally, for the ISS, that they would build both the CTV and the Columbus lab Module. It was becoming abundantly clear that they could not afford both without increasing what they were willing to spend, and of the European nations that made up ESA, only France was willing to spend more (perhaps because so much of the hardware would be built in France—or perhaps because, alone among the European powers, the French still had dreams that a nation might be known for something more than material comfort and a gradually rising trade surplus). ESA committed to Columbus, and thus by default declared that the CTV for the International Space Station would be the “plain vanilla” Russian-built Soyuz.
But dumb and timid decisions have a way of undoing themselves. The French had wanted to build the CTV, and they had been defeated a little too often within ESA by the cautious, stingy voices. Further, since Soyuz could carry a maximum crew of three, if Soyuz were the CTV, there would need to be two of them parked at the ISS all the time, and for evacuations each of them would have to have a Russian commander . . . which meant that two ranking officers on the ISS would always be Russian. The French, proud and sensitive as always, had begun to realize that as long as they were tied into ESA, and ESA was dominated by penny-pinching Germans and timid Britons, they would be locked into a permanent last place in space—and that position, in any field of endeavor, has been intolerable to the French since the days of Joan of Arc.
In December 1998, Jacques Chirac, having concluded a secret deal with Rockwell, abruptly announced that France was suspending its active participation in ESA, and that from now on it would sell Ariane launches, staff services, and satellites to the European agency, but its first priority would be the French national space program. President Chirac made a direct comparison between this surprise move and De Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO; it was a matter of sovereignty, and a simple statement that only the French could really be trusted to look after French interests.
And almost as an afterthought, he announced that the newly recreated French space agency, and the government-owned company Aerospatiale, recently merged with Dassault, would be working with Rockwell to recreate Apollo II, which he believed would become the CTV of choice for the ISS, and might well be of use to all spacefaring nations, just as the Ariane had proved to be. As always, France was roundly denounced in the European Parliament and in the national legislatures—and did what it wanted to.
By 2003, when the great debate surrounding the commission’s report was boiling in the American Congress, more than a dozen French crews, the last several of them crews of six, had flown in the Apollo II, launched on Ariane, and Rockwell’s French section of its spacecraft division was the pride of the company. Thus part three of the commission’s report, to buy Apollo IIs as a temporary vehicle for supplementary missions, could be sold—and was sold—as “bringing Apollo back home.”
I remember Dad having a long argument with the NASA Public Affairs Officer about that; she had actually come out to the house to brief him on what to say, and she stressed to him, over and over, that “the most important thing to remember is to emphasize just how much you’d like to be flying an Apollo, a proven American technology.”
“But I never have. I’ve never even really looked at the controls on one. And anyway I’m not a pilot.” He sounded the way he did when he wanted you to understand something that he thought was obvious.
“You want a space program? If we have one at all, it’s going to have to be built around Apollo II for the next two or three years, and that means you’re going to say you’d like to be in it. It’s not like you’re lying, Dr. Terence. You’re just stressing the parts of the truth that will do the most good. Now what are you going to say?”
“That Apollo II hasn’t killed a Frenchman yet. I wouldn’t mind flying one, and besides it’s really an American ship if you look at the fact that it’s an American company making it—they’re just using French labor to build a French design.”
She sighed and pushed her glasses up onto her forehead. “You aren’t making this easy for us. Don’t you want to go into space in one of these?”
“I want to go to space in anything and everything, including a bathtub. All I’m saying is, if you want me to endorse this thing, you’ve got to let me look at one.”
Dad won that one; they let him go to Paris for three weeks to play around on the simulators and talk to French astro-Fs (astropilots de France—since the Russians insisted on “cosmonaut” and the Americans on “astronaut,” patriotic Frenchmen were not about to have their space explorers called by anything other than a French name). Mom and I visited him there and he dragged us around to a thousand little cafe’s and historic sites, mostly in the company of several astro-Fs with whom he had become friends. When NASA finally got him back to the U.S. Dad was the Apollo II’s most enthusiastic salesman. The whole thing must have taught NASA a lesson about how to cope with Chris Terence, because from then on
whenever they had a message to get out to the public, Dad got to take a trip and spend a lot of time with interesting people before they officially asked him.
But in return, Dad would get out there and appear on the talk shows and talk to the reporters, with indefatigable energy and utter passion, for days or weeks until the public was sold on the idea. He got great trips which he paid for by giving great tours; NASA understood the deal and liked it, and although Dad complained endlessly about it all, griping that he was really a scientist and not some stupid celebrity, he did it over and over. Maybe he liked visiting other space programs and special projects so much that it compensated him, or maybe he secretly reveled in the publicity. I’m really not sure whether even he knew which it was.
* * * *
3
IF THE COMMISSION’S REPORT HAD BEEN ONLY A PLAN TO BUY AND USE good off-the-shelf hardware—Starboosters, Centurions, a Big Can to replace the U.S. Hab, and Apollo IIs—it wouldn’t have aroused nearly the controversy it did. It was the further parts of the plan, the ones that didn’t deal with the very near future, that caused all the debate.
As with everything else before about 2010, because I was a child at the time, so much of what I now “remember” is what I have constructed from what people told me, and from the stories of Sig and my mother, and from watching video of the actual events years later. And because I owe my profession—in fact, the whole course of my life—to decisions made back at that time, I am not objective, I cannot be objective, and I don’t try.
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