Rockwell and Aerospatiale jointly announced that they would be happy to build and conduct an extra seven Ariane/Apollo II launches per year at that rate, and were immediately denounced for price gouging despite their claims that they were getting more per launch under their monopoly arrangement with NASA.
Lockheed-Martin brought out a beautiful design by Bert Rutan for a gigantic airplane, the Condor, which would carry aloft an orbital vehicle, the Peregrine. A Peregrine would be carried aloft with its fuel tanks empty, because in aerodynamic flight (flying with wings) it takes much more energy to lift a weight than it does to keep it in the air; the two craft, still joined, would rendezvous with a tanker to fill the Peregrine’s fuel tanks in midair, and then the Peregrine would be pushed into an upward trajectory by the Condor and released. It would then fire its engines and continue on to orbit.
Starbird/Starbooster, Condor/Peregrine, and the improved Apollo II/Starbooster/Centurion were all perfectly workable choices; Congress, to its bewilderment, was not being asked to choose, but only to permit.
In the middle of all of this, my father managed to place himself in a position that no one else had thought of. When a reporter asked him, he declared firmly that he was opposed to it, because if space began to pay its own way, then “commercial and not scientific considerations will decide the nature and character of our space flights,” he said, very firmly. “The great tragedy of space is that what matters out there, finally, is the ultimate chance to find out what the universe is all about, but no one ever goes there for what really matters. The scientists gave us the potential to get there, raised the questions that could only be answered by going there, but they were shoved aside, first by the warriors and now by the businessmen, who have made space the arena for violence and greed. I’d be happy to see a space program only half as big if it could be free of the taint of blood and the sleaze of commerce.”
That got a lot of airplay; Mom, sitting next to me on the couch, watched the statement and said, “Well, that’s two ways your father is in trouble.”
“Dad’s in trouble?” I asked, always worried about him since the accident the year before.
“Yep. He’s in trouble with his bosses for taking a position like that without clearing it—I’m sure he is. And he’s in bigger trouble with me, for saying that on somebody else’s show.”
I don’t know whether my mother actually went after him for having given such a great quote to someone else, but she was certainly right about trouble with his bosses at NASA.
It was the biggest fiasco since one of the talk show hosts had asked Aunt Lori to share her fear and let out all the stress of her job on television, and Aunt Lori had said, “I wasn’t afraid because I was too busy. Stress is what you get when your job is worthwhile and interesting, and if you can’t handle fear and stress you ought to eliminate yourself from the breeding pool and spare us all the burden of caring for your worthless offspring.” After that one she had been relegated to talking to carefully selected audiences, generally where no reporters could be expected.
But Dad was always competitive, and maybe he just had to outdo Aunt Lori. They pulled him out of the “Presidential Commission Roadshow” for a couple of weeks, and he stomped angrily around the house, calling NASA or taking calls from them several times a day, not liking what he heard, clearly not pleasing them with what he said. He seemed to be particularly angry and disgusted at Sig Jarlsbourg; I asked him once why he was so mad and what upset him so much about Sig, and he said, “Because the SOB is going to make space just like everywhere else, where money counts for everything, when it could have been the one place where you could really just do science without having money people crap all over it.”
As an astronaut’s son, even at five I knew that acronyms were often the most important part of communication, so I asked him what “SOB” meant and he wouldn’t tell me. Neither would Mom.
In my memory, anyway, it was only a few days later that the first big fight between them happened; she came home and said, “I have to do something extremely important for my career and you’re not going to like it but I need to do it anyway because opportunities like this don’t come along very often.” Just like that, without any pauses, as if she had been rehearsing it all the way home, an hour on the freeway.
Dad prided himself on his reasonableness, so he sat down and looked at her in a very reasonable way, and said, “Well, okay, Amber, tell me.”
“I’ve got an interview and tour with Sig Jarlsbourg for tomorrow.”
“Just ask him reasonable questions and report what he says,” Dad said.
“I don’t think you’re going to think my questions are reasonable,” she said, a little sadly. “I can’t storm in and demand that he tell me why he’s spoiling space for the real scientists.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got to give him the chance to tell his own story in his own words, Chris; it’s part of my job. And that includes giving him questions he can answer that way.”
Right around then was when Grandma abruptly came in and whisked me off to a movie. I knew something was wrong, but they sure weren’t going to let me see what, not just yet anyway.
Mom’s interview with Sig solidified her growing reputation; it was regarded as a masterpiece, revealing the human, interesting side of a complex and brilliant man. It greatly enhanced his popularity, and there’s little doubt that it also aided in the passage of the President’s Space Initiative (the legislative embodiment of the commission’s recommendations) later that week, which carried by two votes in the Senate and about twenty in the House.
Another way to tell that something was wrong was that we had the party to celebrate the passage of the bill at our house, and although there were plenty of astronauts and scientists around Dad, none of the NASA administrators did more than say “Hi.” And even I, at five years old, could see that for a guy who had worked so hard to get the bill passed, Dad didn’t look happy at all. He spent a lot of time at the punch bowl and kind of scowled; later, when I wandered outside I found him sitting on the chaise longue, just looking up at the Moon, and sat down next to him. He didn’t look at me, but he put his arm around my shoulders; we stayed out there till practically everyone had left the party, and I kept hearing my mother’s nervous laugh as she explained, over and over, that her husband seemed to have disappeared but she knew he really appreciated that they had come to the party. Finally he fell asleep, and then I climbed up next to him and fell asleep, too; I only sort of woke up when Mom and Grandma came out and got us. By that time, the full Moon had almost set.
* * * *
4
I GUESS YOU COULD SAY THE NEXT FEW YEARS KIND OF FLEW BY. I DONT remember much about them. I try not to.
I remember my parents yelling at each other a lot, but I suppose lots of people have similar memories. There was a story or two I heard later; Mom mentioned that she completed her on-camera interview with Sig, really, by eleven in the morning—he was extremely efficient and covered what was needed quickly—and then found herself having lunch with him. By that time there weren’t cameramen, per se; for interviews they used the double-track, a digital recorder that kept a camera focused on each of the people involved and recorded a complete sound track. So somehow or other at lunch, he canceled the rest of the day’s appointments, and she told the network she would be going long—
And I have the tape of the afternoon interview. Sig talked a long time about his vision of the future, including quoting the Brautigan poem about machines of loving grace and all that. He went on about the potential for a world where everything dangerous or dirty was done “out in the safe vacuum.” He talked about what he called the Planetary Park.
Mom always said that she thinks she fell in love with him that afternoon. There’s not one romantic word on that tape, nor anything about love or home or family, nothing that isn’t about space industrialization. I never did quite get around to asking Mom how she fell in love with him that afternoon; it’s jus
t one of those mysterious things, I guess.
Anyway, Mom also says they had no more contact except for three more interviews, and they all were like that—until the day she and Dad announced their divorce, and it was in the press. Then Sig waited exactly six months, to the day, and called her. They met for coffee, then they took off someplace for a weekend, then—less than a year after her divorce from Dad—they got married. It lasted right up to 2058, when Sig died, a fifty-three-year marriage, and even now I don’t really understand much about it except that the minute they met, they seemed to have been destined for each other. Stuff like that still happens, even nowadays, I guess.
Probably it was a good thing, all things considered. Dad wasn’t somebody to stay married to. Understand me, I loved my father, and there were some things I got from him that are absolutely precious to me, but the truth was he wasn’t such a great husband, and he never really did understand people very well.
I didn’t have much of a handle on what all the yelling was about, and then later, when I was twelve and he had died and all the scandals started coming out, I understood that the basic problem was that as Dad became more famous, he got all kinds of attention, and being the basically arrogant guy he was, he felt he deserved that. I think my mother always respected him—at least his abilities and intelligence—but what he wanted, or at least what he got used to on the road, was more the kind of admiration that you only get from strangers, when you’re famous. Most especially the kind you get from young women.
By then Dad had sort of graduated from the NASA speaking circuit; he was still an active astronaut getting ready for missions, but NASA was no longer putting him on the road. Partly this was because the President’s Space Initiative had already passed, and mostly it was because his attack on commercialization and the military had offended a lot of people. NASA certainly knew who paid the bills and why there was interest, and the “pure science” views he was espousing were embarrassing.
That was probably the reason so many college campuses invited him; he pretty well assured them of controversy, which meant that his speech would get covered by the press—and every college speaker series wants that. And it was really a something-for-everyone show, because he’d talk at great length about the scientific wonders that were possible to discover out there, then ferociously attack the whole idea of commercialization and privatization, and then, because some student always would ask the setup question, he would get to explain why even though he had some deep disagreements he was still staying with NASA and he was still proud to be an astronaut—and that strong expression of loyalty would be a real tear-jerker. I have no doubt he meant every word, too. I don’t think Chris Terence ever spoke a sentence that he didn’t mean.
It just happened that old-fashioned loyalty plus complete sincerity was a formula that would appeal to almost anyone, and especially to college students.
After the lectures, for which he was well paid, would come the receptions, and at the reception there would usually be a couple of pretty, polite young women who talked to Chris—or rather listened to him talk—with deep, intense sincerity, as if they found him fascinating. He would ask them questions about themselves, and they would stammer out very simple replies, usually adding that they didn’t think they were very interesting people, and after a while there would be just one of them left. Dad would keep circulating, and the young woman would stay close to him as he chatted with faculty and allowed administrators to say things to him that (they would later claim to others) “impressed him very much.” Finally there would be just a few people left, and they would all go to a bar for a couple of drinks, and then Dad would go back to his hotel room from the bar with the young woman, who would be the sole survivor of the process.
By the time that the divorce happened, Dad had managed to make himself fairly famous (while never admitting that he enjoyed the fame and attention, and always telling Mom and me that he wished he could spend more time with us), so naturally the tabloids had a field day, and more so because, as everyone noticed after a while, the young women he was taking back to his room looked a lot like college pictures of his wife. I have always been a little glad that I was too young to understand how humiliating the whole thing was for Mom, and I truly have to give both her and Sig credit; neither of them ever really said a harsh word about Dad in my presence.
Anyway, there was a minor custody problem, but nobody ever forced me to take sides; both of them wanted me, neither of them had as much time to spend on me as they would have liked, and therefore they were each trying to insure that I got enough time with the other. Nonetheless it was confusing and upsetting; eventually I ended up with Dad for a while because Mom was off on her honeymoon with Sig.
It was perfectly clear that Dad hated Sig, but he wouldn’t let me say anything bad about the stranger who, as far as I could tell, had bewitched and kidnapped my mother. Dad spent a lot of time just sitting outside and staring up at the sky; now and then he’d have a date with somebody way too young to ever be my mother, who always talked to me as if I were three even though I was almost eight. I hated those nights a lot; many times I thought that if Dad had any sense he’d have taken the baby-sitter, who was often my Aunt Lori, out for a date, and left the girl he was dating here to take care of me.
I mentioned it to him once, and he said that nothing between him and Lori would ever have worked out, but that was all he said. All I knew was, he often came back from his dates very depressed and sometimes angry, and sat outside and stared at the sky; usually I had a great time with Lori playing games with me and reading me stories until bedtime. Even then I guess I knew the world got more complicated for adults.
After a while Mom and Sig got back, but since they were going to be moving to Washington, D.C., in a year or so, I stayed with Dad and visited over there. I understood that there was a lot of excitement going on because now the Skygrazers were flying regularly, and people were pouring in to buy chances for them and for the later Starbirds and Starbird/Luna trips.
Christmas of 2005 was almost okay. By that time I’d gotten sort of adjusted, and I was used to my room in Dad’s apartment; I sort of had three sets of parents, because Dad had me during the week, Mom and Sig had me on weekends, and a lot of times if there was any problem with handing me over—like Dad being out of town on Friday and Mom not getting in till Saturday—I would just stay with Aunt Lori. It wasn’t as nice as if everyone had been getting along, but I was pretty sure there would always be somebody around if I needed anything.
For the holiday, I got up Christmas morning at Dad’s, and Aunt Lori dropped by with a couple of her friends, which pretty much made up for Dad having Allison over (she was a college student with bright red hair; she wore way too much lipstick and began every sentence with “like”; that’s all I remember of that one). Allison gave me the kind of stuffed animal that a girl, or a much smaller boy, would get, Dad gave me some books and some science kits, and Aunt Lori gave me an incredibly wonderful kit for building a flying scale model of a Starbird. Dad looked kind of surprised, but since I was so thrilled, he was happy, too. Aunt Lori promised that sometime soon she and I would put it together, and there was a big lot out behind her house where we could try flying it.
Then I went over to Mom and Sig’s place in the afternoon, and Dad agreed to come in and have a drink with Sig when he dropped me off, and they were both very polite to each other, which was nice. After a while Dad left and they got out the presents.
Mom had given me a lot of clothes, some music, and some videos of classic movies; I think she was trying to make me cultured.
For a minute as I was unwrapping Sig’s gift to me, my heart sank—the box looked just like the one from the Starbird model Aunt Lori had given me, and I was trying to think of how I could be polite. But then I saw that it wasn’t a flying Starbird model—it was a Starbooster/Skygrazer combination. Better still, the Starbooster was designed to go with the Starbird I already had, so that I could fly the booster with either the St
arbird or Skygrazer.
I looked up at Sig and he winked. “I didn’t know what would be cool enough,” he said, “so I called up your Aunt Lori and asked her. Was I right?”
“Oh, yeah. Or Aunt Lori was. I think she’s always right.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sig said gravely.
The next week, between Christmas and New Year’s, Mom and Sig were off skiing and Dad had a conference he was addressing someplace, so I stayed with Lori, and we put the models together—she was one of those rare grownups that can let you do it while still helping you do it right. Both the Skygrazer and the Starbird flew beautifully with the Starbooster, and I realized that I now had something really impressive to show off when I got back to school in a few days.
While Aunt Lori and I were sitting and watching the news, the phone rang; I could tell from the way she answered that it was Dad, and that the news was mixed. She came back and sat down next to me, putting an arm around me. I knew right then that something was up, and even if Aunt Lori was there with me, it was still going to be some kind of bad news. I asked her, “What is it? And why didn’t Dad talk to me?”
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