system. Big enough to dwarf anything on Earth. Everest was only five miles high; those babies must be fifteen miles at least. So high they were poking above the dust storms; so high they were above the bulk of the atmosphere itself.
‘Natalie? Are you okay?’
York couldn’t believe her eyes. She had Priest call up image after image.
At least, she reflected later, the mystery of the Martian geology had taken her mind off Priest.
Saturday, December 11, 1971 NASA Headquarters, Washington DC
After Fred Michaels hung up, Tim Josephson sat in his office, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
The decision was made.
He supposed he ought to be feeling triumph. Exultation. We’ve got what we wanted, by God. Another huge boondoggle, a program that ought to keep thousands of us NASA employees gainfully employed for a decade or more.
But the truth was, he felt too tired and beat-up to care. He was having a little trouble focusing his eyes. He’d been chained to his desk and phone all day, working in support of Fred Michaels’s machinations. And there were still a hundred and one things to be finished up. But, he told himself, there was nothing that wouldn’t keep until the next day.
So he took his shoes off and got his feet up on his desk, and he started dictating into a pocket tape recorder.
The last few months had given Josephson, working as a close aide of Fred Michaels’s, a startling insight into the way major national decisions were made: at the highest level in the land, with at stake national prestige, tens of billions of dollars spread across many years, and hundreds of high-profile careers in politics, industry, the military. Some day he was going to write a book about all this. Management in the Space Age, maybe.
The decision about America’s future in space had turned out to be extraordinarily painful.
It had been clear to Josephson from the beginning that Nixon wanted to spend as little as possible on space.
The fact was, Nixon – belying his image – had brought a pretty liberal domestic agenda to the White House; in the midst of a debilitating war, he wanted to free up money to pay for expanded social entitlement programs, and wage and price controls.
Space was one place that money could come from. But space was a tough lobby to fight.
So, soon after coming into office, Nixon had allowed Congress to reorganize the standing space committees out of existence, so that now space was the purview of the Senate Commerce and House Science and Technology subcommittees. Losing its special interface to Congress, NASA was in danger of being emasculated, losing its heroic status, becoming just another spending department fighting for funds.
To most people involved in the space program, even within NASA, such changes were all but invisible; but to an insider like Josephson – and Michaels – they were dramatic, a potent signifier of Nixon’s real determination to downgrade the profile of space.
But then the White House had come up against the aerospace industry.
Aerospace was ailing, as ever. In fact technological progress was making life even tougher. New systems were either not deployed at all or had short production runs: if it works, it’s obsolete. Aerospace firms had to bet the farm every time they accepted a contract.
But obviously the government needed a healthy aerospace industry. So ways had to be found to feed the industry in slack times: to spread wealth, and to subsidize research. The civilian space program was perfect for this purpose. It always had been.
So, from the start of 1971, Fred Michaels had started to put it about that the aerospace industry might not be able to survive another year of diminished space work; he spoke particularly to Congressmen from states like California, Texas and Florida, where aerospace depression was an acute electoral issue. And he quietly encouraged the contractors contributing to the various program studies to talk up their estimates of the employment the various options would stimulate. It was all designed to keep the pressure on the White House. 1972 is an election year. We need a space program to keep the aerospace guys in work … But what’s that program going to be?
Josephson was mildly shocked how quickly the scientific and exploratory aspects of spaceflight were discarded as factors in shaping the new program. Nobody with any clout cared about going to Mars, or anywhere else, for the science. And nobody argued – he was more surprised to observe – on the basis of the benefits of space spin-offs. After all, if you wanted the spin-offs, why go into space at all? Why not turn the R&D money and NASA’s fabled management skills directly to other, more worthy programs?
These were hard questions to answer. So Michaels, bluntly, avoided them.
In public, Michaels played up space as an adventure – something a nation like the US ought to be able to afford, damn it. Astronauts from the heroic days, including Joe Muldoon, were wheeled out to serve as living reminders of good moments gone. After Michaels’s skillful PR hoopla, Mars came to seem a little more acceptable. There was a snowball effect, and some support for the option started to appear on the Hill.
And, slowly, the opinion polls showed public opposition to a Mars option dropping.
But NASA’s budget was still far too high. In July, members of Congress had moved twice to delete manned spaceflight altogether from the FY1972 budget.
It was a dangerous moment in history, and the hard bargaining continued.
What can we drop?
At one point Josephson had believed Nixon was coming close to approving the Space Shuttle system – just that one item, out of all the options his Task Group had presented. At least the goal of the Shuttle was to do with reducing costs, and the Shuttle would actually have been the favored option of the aerospace lobby because of all the new development it would have entailed.
But the Shuttle program had quickly become a mess. It was obvious, Josephson thought, that the final, low-cost Shuttle design was a bastardized compromise, put together by committee to satisfy conflicting interests. And Michaels wasn’t above drafting in his predecessor, Paine – a great lover of the Mars option whom Michaels had replaced in September – to point out the Shuttle’s strong military flavor: it was no accident that the low, hundred-mile orbits which were all the Space Shuttle was capable of, and its wide-ranging flyback capabilities, were ideally suited to Air Force missions.
The Space Shuttle would be cute technology, with nowhere to go except low Earth orbit reconnaissance missions. In an era in which detente was becoming the fashion, the military taint of the Shuttle was unpalatable. And besides, Kennedy and others never ceased to remind the public, there was nothing heroic about it.
So Josephson had watched, not unhappily, as the Shuttle quietly faded from Nixon’s thinking. The next generation of launch vehicles for manned flight, instead, would probably be a series of upgraded Saturns.
It looked as if there would be no elaborate space station modules, either, as the Space Task Group had proposed; just an extended series of Skylabs, improvised from Saturn fuel tanks. The engineers inside NASA screamed like hell at this, especially Mueller and his space station lobby. But it all brought the cost profile closer to something the White House might be able to endorse.
Of course, contained in the final program there would be tradeoffs. Rockwell had been hot favorites as lead contractors for the canned Shuttle. And now it looked as if their big rivals Boeing were going to get the largest piece of the new space booster pie, because Boeing, manufacturers of the huge Saturn S-IC first stage, were going to be lead contractors in the new enhanced Saturn project. Boeing had all sorts of ideas for reducing the costs of the Saturn V system, for instance by adding strap-on reusable rockets to it, and even making the S-IC itself recoverable, including wings, parachutes, hydrogen-filled balloons, drag brakes, paragliders, and rotary systems of spinning parachutes.
So Rockwell