Actually the launch center is near the town of Tyuratam, more than three hundred kilometers southwest of Baikonur, on the main rail line from Moscow to Tashkent.
In those days of suspicion there was no public mention of Kaliningrad, the mission control center from which the earliest manned space flights were directed. Gagarin’s pioneering orbit of the Earth, the thousands of man-hours of flight aboard a dozen space stations, and finally the first expedition to Mars — all were directed from the center at Kaliningrad, about six kilometers northeast of the outermost circular motorway ringing metropolitan Moscow.
The protocol for directing the Mars mission had been decided upon long before the various spacecraft had even begun to be assembled in Earth orbit. Knowing that there would be a communications lag of ten minutes or more between Mars and Earth, the mission planners placed full authority in the hands of the expedition commander, Dr. Li Chengdu.
There was no need for Dr. Li to check with mission command at Kaliningrad before making a decision.
The day-to-day operations of the teams in orbit around Mars and on the planet’s surface were his responsibility.
That did not mean, however, that he could not be overruled.
Having given his assent to Vosnesensky and Waterman’s unscheduled dash to Tithonium Chasma, Dr. Li routinely reported the change in the excursion plan back to Kaliningrad. Routinely, in this case, meant that he waited until the end of his day, as usual, before filing his report. The rover team’s diversion to Tithonium was given as item number seventeen of his customary daily report. Seventeen of twenty-two.
So it was slightly after four in the morning in Russia when his report arrived. The mission controllers worked three shifts, of course, but their directors — the men and women who made the real decisions — were soundly sleeping when Li’s report began scrolling on the display screen of the chief controller for this shift.
He was a Russian who took his duties seriously. Sitting beside him at the console was his American counterpart, a perky redheaded engineer on loan from CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Shoulder to shoulder, they read the report from the expedition commander on the display screen, the American woman slightly impatient with her colleague’s slower pace at reading English. The mission control center was quiet and still at this hour. Even though all the stations were manned, there was little activity and less talk.
Until the American controller suddenly exclaimed, "He okayed it! Without checking with us?"
Eyes snapped wide and heads turned toward her.
The Russian chief controller said, "Dr. Li is within his authority…"
"The hell he is," said the American. Her green eyes were blazing fury. "The protocol specifically states that any major change in the schedule must be cleared with mission control first!"
"Major change," the Russian said mildly.
"You don’t think a six-hundred-kilometer diversion of that rover team is a major change?" She yanked the telephone from its receptacle on the console and began pecking out a number. "How much fuel does that buggy hold, anyway? Aren’t they putting themselves in danger of getting stranded?"
The Russian tapped the console keyboard, and the specifications for the Mars rover displaced Dr. Li’s report on their display screen.
"It has a cruising radius of one thousand kilometers," he said. "More than half its mass is fuel. An enormous safety factor."
"Not if they’re throwing in an unscheduled twelve hundred kilometers, it isn’t."
"You are calling the chief mission director at this hour?"
"Hell no, I’m not that crazy," the American answered, a slight grin breaking through her anger. "I’m calling Houston."
The Russian smiled back at her. "Ah — and they will wake up the chief."
"Right. I may be quick-tempered but I’m not stupid."
HOUSTON: The chain of command on Earth was split, like everything else about the Mars mission, into two strands. While mission control was in Kaliningrad, there was a "shadow" mission control team at the old NASA center at Clear Lake, near Houston.
The center had been created in the early nineteen-sixties as a political plum for Texas. Originally designated the Manned Space Center and built nearly an hour’s drive from downtown Houston, the center became the home of the astronauts, the place where all manned space activities were planned and directed. Eventually it was named after Lyndon B. Johnson. As Vice-President, Johnson had chaired John F. Kennedy’s space council and pushed vigorously for the daring program to land Americans on the moon within the decade of the sixties.
But no matter how swiftly the engineers moved, the tides of history swirled faster. By the time the first astronauts set foot on the moon, Kennedy was dead and his successor, Johnson, out of office. The American space program, seemingly at the peak of success, was being gutted and virtually murdered, a victim of the Vietnam War that Johnson had escalated.
Yet the Johnson Space Center remained and even grew. As the hub of all manned space activities, it became headquarters for the hundreds of astronauts recruited to fly the space shuttle and its successors. Men and women trained there before they were allowed to ride up to the American space station Freedom or any of the foreign (or even private) space stations that orbited the Earth.
At first glance the Johnson Space Center looked rather like a university campus. Modernistic glass-walled buildings and green lawns, a relaxed atmosphere, young men and women strolling from one building to another or driving their cars along the wide tree-lined streets. At the main entrance, though, there rested a mammoth Saturn V rocket, a relic of the old Apollo era, lying on its side like a beached whale. And behind the tall towers of glass and steel were smaller windowless buildings that hummed with electrical power and the throbbing of pumps and motors.
In one of those windowless buildings the "shadow" mission control center was located. It was slightly after eight P.M. on a quiet, warm Texas evening when the inquiry came from Kaliningrad.
Here too, the top decision makers had left for the day and scattered to their suburban homes. The desks and consoles were thinly staffed by only a handful of men and women, most of them young and new to their responsibilities.
The man in charge, a middle-aged systems analyst, was munching on a bag of cheese-flavored tortilla chips when his "red" phone buzzed. With a mixture of pique and puzzlement clouding his fleshy face, he picked up the phone.
It was pure chance that the American controller in Kaliningrad was someone he knew personally. They had gone through several semesters together at CalTech.
"Josie, how are ya?" he said to the tense face that appeared on his display screen. "Those Russkies treating you okay?"
Almost a heartbeat’s delay, as the electronic signal bounced off a communications satellite, before her answer came to him.
"Sam, we’ve got a problem here."
He lurched forward in his chair. "Whatsamatter?"
"Dr. Li has okayed an extension of the rover excursion without checking with mission control first."
"Jesus Christ!" He placed a chubby hand over his heaving chest. "I thought there was real trouble. Don’t scare me like that, Jo!"
"This is trouble — it’s a violation of the command decision-tree protocol."
"Aw, crap. If the goddam rover broke down or somebody got stranded out there, that’s trouble. This is just paperwork."
She would not be put off. "You’ve got to get Maxwell and Goldschmitt on the phone. They’ve got to know about this right away."