Benacerraf watched him as he worked, the heady talk of Titan and Shuttle-Cs and Apollos flowing around him. Kevin’s smooth, moonlike face was blank, incurious; Benacerraf doubted he heard a word that was said.
He had a new image-tattoo on his forehead, Benacerraf saw. The lozenge-shaped patch of glowing photochemicals cycled through images of smoky star-clusters, evidently downloaded from one of the Hubble picture libraries.
She found she’d made her decision.
Here, in this room, she thought, it starts. And it won’t end until we land on Titan.
As he left, Marcus White winked at Benacerraf. ‘Everest, El Dorado, Mayflower. I don’t know whether we’re going to Titan or not, or why the hell. But you sure do throw one great party, kid.’
The first task was to flesh out the mission profile.
Benacerraf set Barbara Fahy working on the feasibility of adapting mission control software and techniques to handle the Saturn and Shuttle-C launches, and the extended mission profile after that.
She quickly came back to Benacerraf with a schedule and costing. Fahy had shown how STS mission control techniques could be adapted with a little effort to run Shuttle-C and revived Saturn programs. Then, looking ahead for a feasible way to run a manned mission to Saturn, Fahy argued that you didn’t want to have a full team of controllers employed for all six or eight or ten years. Fahy’s projection showed how a scaled-down Mission Control operation would suffice to run the flight itself after the initial interplanetary injection sequence; hands-off techniques developed to run extended Earth-orbit operations aboard Station could be adapted. It would be necessary to rehire staff or attach contract workers during the later crucial mission phases, like a Jupiter encounter. But it could all be done for a containable cost.
Benacerraf was working to a timetable she hadn’t yet shared with many people. And to her, the setup schedule even for this ground-based aspect of the mission looked tight. But then, everything would be tight, pushing against the clock, until the last Shuttle lifted off the pad …
Benacerraf worked through Fahy’s case carefully.
Barbara Fahy was almost pathetically eager to work on this proposal, to find some way of redeeming her self-respect after being lead Flight on Columbia. It seemed to do no good to point out that Fahy was not responsible for the hardware and testing flaws that had led to the orbiter’s destruction, that no blame had been attached to her – that, in fact, her career had been done no perceptible damage at all.
As far as Fahy was concerned, it had been her mission. And she’d lost it.
Still, her judgement was unimpaired; her work on this issue looked good.
Benacerraf accepted the recommendation, but a seed of doubt lodged in her mind. A scaled down Mission Control would be fine, but if some kind of Apollo 13 situation blew up, halfway to Jupiter, the crew would need fast backup by experts on the ground: revised procedures, survival techniques, simulator proving … there mightn’t be time to hire up and train the people needed.
Anyhow, with that basic framework in hand, Barbara Fahy called in the senior members of her control team, and, with Benacerraf, talked them through the proposed flight.
They listened in silence – stunned, frightened silence, Benacerraf thought.
If NASA sent a spacecraft to Saturn, it would be these young, smart people – or their peers – who would have the responsibility for seeing that all the burns happened at the right times, for the right durations, with the spacecraft in the right attitudes; they would have to oversee navigation all the way to Titan, and prepare abort contingency plans.
There was a lot of scepticism. Even hostility. ‘How do you think we’re gonna do this?’ ‘We can’t possibly. All our systems are designed for low Earth orbit missions.’ ‘How can you think –’
Fahy knew her people, however, and she let them run down. ‘Just chew it over for a few days,’ she told them. ‘You don’t have to come up with all the answers at once. And talk to people. Talk to the Apollo old-timers, about the problems of deep space manned missions. Talk to the guys at JPL, about interplanetary navigation techniques. I know it’s one hell of a challenge, guys, the biggest since Apollo –’
‘But,’ said one languid young man – introduced by Fahy as Gary Munn – ‘those 1960s guys could look forward to some kind of career within NASA. More than one mission, a future. Not just a one-off stunt like this.’
Fahy glared at him. ‘We’re talking about going to Saturn, for God’s sake. The greatest adventure in human history. A journey that will be talked about as long as mankind survives. An exploration that even eclipses Armstrong’s. Don’t you care about being a part of that?’
But Munn just stared back, his expression unreadable to Benacerraf.
I really don’t understand this new generation, she thought.
After a couple of days, Benacerraf had Fahy and her planners host a wider meeting at which the details of the mission were explored. Big, powerful suites of trajectory-mapping software – primed with precise predictions of the planets’ positions for decades to come – were deployed by the planners, running through option after option, with mission duration and initial mass in Earth orbit numbers scrolling over spread-out softscreens.
The programs soon converged on an optimal trajectory. It was essentially similar to the complex path taken by Cassini to make the same trip, with the early part of the trajectory wrapped around the inner planets, slingshots off Earth and Venus, before unwinding towards the outer Solar System, and a final gravity assist from Jupiter. The meeting argued around the details and parameters, before settling on a recommendation:
To launch in January, 2008.
It would be, Benacerraf realized, one hell of a tight development schedule. Maybe even unachievable.
But it fit her internal timetable. It would be a whole year before Maclachlan was scheduled to take office and ground everything, and only a year for the bad guys in the USAF and beyond to find a way to close down NASA, and maybe not so far in the future that all of the current post-Chinese push back into space had worn off.
There really was no choice. The window of opportunity was closing quickly. If Americans were going to travel beyond the Moon, it would have to be in 2008. Or never.
Benacerraf studied the smooth trajectory curves scrolling across the softscreens. ‘We understand this stuff so well,’ she said to Fahy. ‘It’s astonishing how quickly we can produce material like this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Barbara Fahy said sourly. ‘Our civilization has become expert at interplanetary navigation. It’s just that we’ve chosen to abandon the capability to do any of it.’
‘Actually,’ Gary Munn said brightly, ‘we can run the projections forward and back. Even as far back as the 1960s there were proposals to slingshot off Venus and fly to Mars, and so forth, in the near future of the time; it’s interesting to move the planets back to their configurations, in 1982 or 1986, and see how accurately those old guys got their predictions.’ He worked his keypad briskly, and Benacerraf watched trajectory curves wrap around the sun, depicting the paths of spacecraft that never were, travelling to Mars in 1982 and 1986 and 1992.
To Benacerraf,
