Apollo 14 had been the biggest success since the first landing: even skeptics among the scientists were applauding the mission.
But it was done.
Seger’s footsteps echoed in the quiet. It was just two years since Apollo 11, he thought, and yet the first age of lunar exploration was already over. Damn it, Seger thought. We’ve just gotten good at this stuff, and now we have to stop.
He stopped at the door of the MOCR, Mission Control, and stepped in. The MOCR was deserted; everybody had already left for the splashdown party, some almighty gumbo affair the Mission Evaluation guys were holding over in Building 45.
He climbed the steps to the Flight Director’s console: the heart of a mission, even more so than the couch of the spacecraft commander himself. The big twenty-by-ten-foot screen at the front of the room was black, cold. The controllers’ consoles were littered with books, logs, checklists, headsets, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and half-smoked cigars. Some of the controllers had left behind the little Stars and Stripes they’d waved when the spacecraft splashed down.
Maybe, he thought, someday these consoles would be full of data streaming in from a manned spacecraft in orbit around Mars.
Standing here, thinking of it in those terms, it didn’t seem possible; but then, the lunar landing must have seemed just as impossible back in 1959, when NASA didn’t yet exist, and technicians had taken Mercury boilerplate capsules to the Cape on the backs of flatbed trucks, cushioned by mattresses.
It was Bert Seger’s job to make Mars happen.
Seger had been appointed, just a month ago, as a deputy director of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, one of NASA’s four big divisions. His job was running the embryonic Mars Program Office, here in Houston.
Fred Michaels had become the new Administrator, after Tom Paine’s resignation, and he seemed determined to pull the Agency out of the mess his predecessor had left behind. And he had appointed Bert Seger himself.
“Bert, the damn Mars thing is already coming apart at the seams, and we haven’t even gotten back the final Phase A definition reports yet. Look — I need someone to do for Mars what Joe Shea did for the Moon program, back in the early days. To pull the thing together. Or we’re never going to get it past Nixon.”
Seger understood. “You need a foreman,” he’d said. “And an enforcer.”
“Damn right I do. Will you do it?”
“Damn right I will.”
“Then here’s your first job,” Michaels had said. “Sort out the goddamn mission mode…”
The competing industry contractors, preparing their Phase A preliminary studies, were all working on different ways of getting to Mars, but the routes they were planning were all direct: Earth to Mars, and back to Earth. And there was some guy in Langley who was kicking up a fuss about another mode. Something to do with flying by Venus on the way.
“Some little jerk called Dana,” Michaels said. “Gregory Dana. He wrote direct to me. Can you believe it?” Dana had bypassed all the bureaucratic channels, and had gotten right up a lot of asses.
“Is he right? About Venus?”
“How in hell do I know? Could I care less, at this point? This Dana has them all — the Marshall guys, the rest of Langley, the contractors, the budget office, the damn Science Advisory Committee — buzzing like wasps in a jar. The Requests For Proposal for Phase B detailed definition studies are about to go out. This Dana is putting all of that under threat. Bert, I want you to sort it out for me…”
Seger didn’t doubt his own ability to resolve the mode issue. Nor did he doubt that he’d be able to fulfill his greater commission: to pull together the Mars program. If that was what the country decided it wanted to do.
Seger always prayed, intensely, for a few minutes at the start of the working day, or before tackling a major task. He felt that showed that his character had deep roots, strength, conviction. Standing there in the MOCR, he offered up a brief prayer.
He thought of that fragile little world 240,000 miles away, where three LM descent stages still sat, surrounded by footprints and scuffed-up lunar soil. But the footprints, and the flags, even the science — none of that was really the point, as far as Seger was concerned. Not even getting there ahead of the Russians. To his mind, what Apollo had proved was that men could indeed travel to places beyond the Earth, and live and work there.
The Moon hadn’t been as exotic as some had suspected. Some had predicted that the astronauts would sink into miles of dust. Or that the mountains of the Moon might be fragile, like huge gray meringues maybe, and would collapse in puffs of dust when the astronauts tried to walk there. Or maybe the moondust would catch fire, or explode, when the astronauts brought it into the LM. Or the astronauts would be afflicted by terrible diseases…
In the end, those hardheaded engineers who had stubbornly insisted that the Moon would be just like Arizona — and had designed the LM’s landing gear that way — had turned out to be right. That’s what I’ve gotta bear in mind, he thought. Mars will be just like Arizona, too.
To Seger, that was a magical thought, as if Earth and Moon and Mars were somehow unified, physically bridged, as they were bridged by the exploits of Americans.
He walked carefully down the steps, away from the Flight Director’s console, and latched the door behind him.
Monday, August 16, 1971
Gregory Dana arrived late, his Vu-graph foils and reports bundled under his arm; by the time he reached the conference room — right next to the office of von Braun himself — it was already full, and he had to creep to the back to find a space.
The room was on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building, colloquially known as the von Braun Hilton. Just about everybody who counted seemed to be here: senior staff from Marshall and Houston, a few managers from NASA Headquarters in Washington, and a lot of people from the contractors whose studies were being presented today.
At the front of the room, so remote from Dana that it was difficult to see his face, Bert Seger, head of the nascent Mars Program Office, was making his opening remarks.
They were all here to listen to the Mars mission mode Phase A studies final presentations. Their purpose today, Seger said, was to settle on a recommended mode for the development program. The group had to regard itself as in competition for resources and endorsement with the parallel studies going on into the reusable Space Shuttle; a similar heavyweight meeting had recently been held in Williamsburg to thrash out some of the conceptual issues involved in that program.
In his rapid Bronx delivery Seger gave them a little pep talk: about the need for open discussion, for receptivity, and for a willingness for all there to walk out of the room with a consensus behind whatever mode was favored. Dana could see a little crucifix glinting on Seger’s lapel, under a wilting pink carnation.
Dana doubted that anyone missed the subtext of what Seger was saying. Congress was approving the requested funding for NASA’s FY1972, but the big expenditure for whatever program was settled on was going to start in FY1973. And President Nixon still hadn’t made up his mind about the future of the space program. It was said he might even can manned spaceflight altogether, and look for some superscience stunt on Earth that might prove a better fit with the mood of the times.