Rosenberg said. ‘Then it can land as hard as you like.’
‘And what about the crew?’ Angel said.
‘All you need is a couple of simple man-rated entry capsules,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Remember, we aren’t talking about any kind of ascent-to-orbit capability; it’s a one-way trip.’ He grinned. ‘You still aren’t thinking big enough, Bill.’
‘And you,’ Angel snapped back, ‘are talking out of your ass. An entry capsule like that is still a billion-dollar development. We just don’t have that kind of resource.’
Rosenberg looked flustered, and Benacerraf realized that for the first time he didn’t have an answer.
She felt an immense sadness descend on her. Is it possible that this is the hole that destroys the proposal? That, after all, it ends here?
How sad. It was a beautiful dream, while it lasted.
They argued for a while, about requirements and likely costs. It started to get heated, with gestures illustrated by pointed chopsticks. Barbara Fahy held her hands up, palms outward. ‘Hold it,’ she said. ‘I hate to say it, but I think I have a solution.’
Benacerraf frowned. ‘Tell me.’
Fahy looked around the table. ‘We use the most advanced entry capsules we ever built. Apollo Command Modules.’
Marcus White was laughing. ‘Oh, man. That is outrageous. Just fucking outrageous. It’s beautiful. Man, I love it.’
Fahy said, ‘All you’d have to do is refurbish the interior, maybe fix up the heatshield, reconfigure for a Titan entry profile.’
Benacerraf said, ‘Marcus, where’s the old Apollo hardware now?’
White was trying to be serious, but grins kept busting out over his face. ‘There were three series of Command Modules: boiler-plates, Block Is and Block IIs. The Block IIs flew all the manned missions; they contained most of the post-fire modifications. The Block IIs is what you’d want to use.’ He closed his eyes. ‘As I recall, Rockwell built twenty-five Block II CMs in all. Okay. Of those twenty-five ships, eleven flew on the Apollo Moon program. Three more flew manned Skylab missions, and one flew on ASTP. Fifteen, right?’
‘Where are they?’ Benacerraf asked. ‘Museums? Could we refurbish an Apollo that’s already been flown?’
Angel frowned. ‘I don’t see how. Those things were pretty much beat up by the time they were recovered. You got the ablation of the heatshield, thermal stresses throughout the structure, salt-water damage from the ocean recovery. The heatshield alone would be a hell of a reconstruction job.’
Benacerraf said, ‘Marcus, what happened to the ten spares? Do you remember?’
‘I sure do,’ he said ruefully. ‘Since they symbolized my career, as it went down the toilet, I followed the fate of those Moon ships with close interest.’ He closed his eyes. ‘They used four for various tests: thermal vacuum and pogo, acoustic, pad checkout. And another three for Skylab tests. They pretty much took those babies apart, for the purposes of the tests.’
‘That leaves three,’ Angel said evenly.
‘Yeah. First you got a Skylab backup. It sat on the pad on top of a Saturn IB as a rescue capability, through the whole Skylab program. And then there were two Moon-trip Apollos, never flown. “Requirement deleted”. Three man-rated spacecraft, never flown, just mothballed.’
Benacerraf felt herself smile. ‘Maybe we’re about to undelete those requirements.’
There was another moment of silence.
Then they started to talk at once. ‘Where are those CMs?’ ‘All in storage at JSC, or Downey.’ ‘Three CMs. Two flight birds and one test vehicle, for verifying the redesign and refurbishment.’ ‘The electronics should be easy. Those old clunky guidance computers they had took up so much damned room. All that core rope and shit …’
Benacerraf let it run on.
It’s coming together, she thought. She felt a core of excitement gather in her gut.
Angel, still drinking hard, was doodling spacecraft configurations and shapes on a smoothed-out paper napkin. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to do this one-way shot, we ought to get away with a fuel load, in Earth orbit, of one and a half million pounds. And of that, around two hundred thousand pounds would be hauled out to Saturn for braking there.’
‘That,’ said Benacerraf, ‘is less than a single Shuttle External Tank.’
‘Yeah,’ White growled. ‘But you’re still looking at a couple of dozen Shuttle flights to put it up there.’
Siobhan Libet said, ‘But you wouldn’t need to use the full Shuttle system. You’re not carrying crew, except on one final flight to orbit.’
Benacerraf prompted, ‘So what do we do instead?’
‘Shuttle-C,’ said Libet promptly. ‘A stripped-down cargo-carrying variant of the Shuttle system. The payload capacity would be raised to a hundred and seventy thousand pounds.’
Mott nodded. ‘But the Shuttle-C is an expendable variant. Essentially you’d be using up the orbiter fleet.’
‘But that doesn’t matter,’ Libet said.
‘She’s right,’ White said. ‘Nicola, we’re working to different rules now. The damn things wouldn’t fly again anyhow. It’s a choice of putting them to work one last time, or stick ’em out in the rain as monuments.’
‘Okay. But even so this is only a partial solution,’ Angel said. ‘We have three orbiters left: Endeavour, Atlantis, Discovery. You’d want to retain one for the final crew launch, so you’re left with two Shuttle-C launches. That would only account for a quarter, maybe, of the total mass in LEO for Titan.’
Libet said, ‘There were two more pre-flight orbiters.’
‘Yes,’ said Benacerraf. ‘Enterprise and Pathfinder. Now, what the hell happened to them?’ She went to a bookcase, and searched through her yellowing Shuttle training materials. ‘Here we go. “Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise: Orbiter Vehicle-101. Enterprise, the first Space Shuttle orbiter, was originally to be named Constitution, for the Bicentennial. However, Star Trek viewers started a write-in campaign urging the White House to rename the vehicle to Enterprise… blah blah … OV – 101 was rolled out of Rockwell’s Air Force Plant 42, Site I –”’
White shrugged. ‘They used Enterprise for the approach and landing tests. Then they decided it would cost too much to upgrade Enterprise for spaceflight. Tough on all those propeller-head Star Trek fans. So they stripped her. She’s a museum piece now.’
Libet asked, ‘What about Pathfinder?’
Benacerraf dug through her documents. “‘The Pathfinder Shuttle Test Article … Pathfinder is a seventy-five ton orbiter simulator that was created to work out the procedures for moving and handling the Shuttle. It was a steel structure roughly the size, weight and shape of an orbiter … Pathfinder was returned to Marshall and now is on permanent display at the Alabama
