Encounter With Tiber Page 6

  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 Centurion 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 re-create 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.

  B
y 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 cafes 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 IIs 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.

  Even with Starbooster/Centurions and Apollo IIs to take up some of the slack, there was going to be a shortage of ways to get people into space for a few years. But there was very little hope of finding additional money in the federal budget to take the next logical step: build a follow-on to the shuttle, something that could use the flyback Zenit as its first stage and then go on to orbit, carrying a crew.

  The X-33 had dead-ended on the way to a true SSTO—single stage to orbit—spacecraft because no material suitable for its hydrogen tanks existed, or was likely to for a while. Eventually, the commission said, there would be SSTOs, and recommended the establishment of a long-range research program to solve the tank material problem. As a friendly gesture to very disappointed SSTO advocates, they suggested that the United States commit to have the material, and begin the design, for an SSTO in 2013, ten years from that date. They suggested dubbing the development effort Project Yankee Clipper, pointing out that the great trading vessels that had carried the American flag all over the globe had also been brilliant designs pushing materials far beyond their limits—and unofficially, as Lori observed, the original clippers could have performed far better if nylon and fiberglass had only been available at the time. “Yankee Clipper” was the perfect name for the ship that would outdo everything else—if only the materials problem could be solved.

  Meanwhile, the conservative low-risk approach to getting people into orbit would remain the way everyone had used so far: the staged rocket. You didn’t have to meet that so-far-impossible 90 percent fuel ratio if you launched not from the stationary ground but from the top of another rocket. Hence, in the almost sixty years of human spaceflight, rockets always flew in stages: a big rocket (the “booster”) lifted a smaller rocket onto a high, fast-moving trajectory, or a group of rockets began the upward journey, all lifting each other, and the rockets that burned out first dropped off. The Saturn V that sent Apollo to the Moon worked on the first principle (the second and third stages were lifted off the Earth and set in motion by the first, the third stage was thrown most of the way to orbit by the second, and the third stage was then already high enough and moving fast enough to head for the Moon). The space shuttle worked on the second principle; it began with all three main engines and the two solid rocket boosters firing, accelerated rapidly upward under all that thrust, then dropped the weight of the solid boosters when they burned out.

  In effect, it had another stage as well, the external tank; when the fuel in that big tank was burned, the tank was dropped. Doing this instead of mounting the fuel tanks inside the vehicle meant, among other things, a much more compact body to return from orbit (which was much easier to work with) and less mass to pull around for operations in orbit.

  Ultimately, better performance would come with better upper stages; as long as two stages were necessary to get to orbit, rather than build a complete new system each time, it made more sense to alternate—first improve the boosters, since they were clearly a major problem, then build a new upper stage to fly on that booster, then return again to improving the booster—a process familiar to anyone who has ever rehabbed a house or rebuilt a car on a tight budget, of fixing whatever is most wrong first and improving other things later, and always returning to redo the weak spot.

  And since to design a new craft took years, if there were to be a follow-on upper stage in a few years, the process would have to begin now—but in the tightly strapped year of 2002, there was practically no money for it.

  There was a solution available to the problem, but there were many people who thought the solution was worse than the problem. To such people, it was a deal with the devil—even if the devil came to them in the form of a man as pleasant and charming as the one who would eventually become my stepfather, Sig Jarlsbourg.

  At the time he was just thirty-two, but his sandy red hair was already graying, and though he was strong and fit, he moved so quietly and precisely that he gave the impression of someone twenty years older. Four years later,
when I first met him, he amazed me the first time he stepped onto a tennis court and seemed to abruptly shrug off his years and play like a teenager.

  By the time he was testifying in front of the Congressional Joint Committee, and his picture was on the cover of Business Week, it had already appeared there four times—the last time with the caption “CAN THEY STOP HIM? DO THEY WANT TO?”

  He was living proof that the best way to get rich is to start that way; his father had been a major player in a large number of oil ventures, and Sig had grown up all over the world. Always adventurous, and with the money to pursue it, he had been a passionate diver by the age of fifteen, with more than twenty technical dives before he enrolled at Stanford. He had gotten his sailplane license a few months after his fourteenth birthday and had begun seriously trying for records before he was twenty.

  Given that he was remarkably handsome and well-groomed, he could have become one of the more successful playboys of the decade, but he had his mind on other things. In his first couple years of college he had joined a number of environmental and “green” groups, only to realize, as he put it later, that “the only way to keep crap out of the air and water, and preserve the beautiful places, is to fix it so that it pays to do that; otherwise you’re always just chasing down the next oil company.”

  His father had sent him a short letter telling him that Stanford tuition cost a lot and that the money was coming from oil companies. The next summer, Sig got together a small group of friends who had a wide variety of outdoor skills and some experience with remote areas, secured a start-up loan, took out ads as Planet Vision Adventure Tours in the highest-end travel publications, skipped classes for a week to go to a travel agents’ convention and buttonhole people, and sold “two-month planetary tours” at $29,000 a shot. With 250 clients over the summer, he shuffled them from one friend to another, taking them climbing the Andes, fly fishing in Patagonia, on camera safari in Kruger National Park, diving off Sri Lanka, and thus eventually around the world. Meanwhile he and his friends got to spend the summer doing things they loved, as guides to the small group of the extremely well-off that he had managed to charm into the experience. As a side benefit, he extracted donations from many of his clients for various “green causes.”