CHAPTER 4

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
--Bill Cosby

2 February, Second Year

Gerald Cooper stared at thirteen wasted months and wondered where they had gone. In spite of President Crane's directives mandating space commercialization, funding continually failed to materialize. This, even with an odd sort of endorsement from Barry Gibbon. While never mentioning Freespace Orbital in the journals of the National Organisation of Space Supporters, Gibbon nevertheless spent the last year or so taking Cooper under his wing. It was all a bit surreal.

Cooper initially met him at a symposium on space commercialization. He had known of Gibbon for years -- the man, after all, had co-founded the National Rocket Society in the late 1940's and served on myriad boards and commissions dedicated to charting the nation's future in Space. Cooper, a space enthusiast from the time he could speak, joined the nrs during the Gemini missions and read in awe the prediction that there would be entire cities in orbit within thirty years. He had seen Gibbon on TV and at conventions and meetings. This time, though, Gibbon actually walked up to him and shook his hand.

"Gerry Cooper," Gibbon said, grasping the man's hand and smiling broadly. He waved a finger almost admonishingly. "I've been watching you and Freespace Orbital over the years."

Cooper felt honored, sort of, to be recognized by Barry Gibbon, but such notice mystified him. Gibbon's efforts since the end of the Skylab project -- when the National Rocket Society became NOSS -- focused almost entirely on the Space Shuttle, with a few glowing mentions of the Soviet space program. The organization gave little notice to non-NASA activities. He long thought that his efforts had simply been unknown to Gibbon. Now he heard otherwise.

Gibbon exhibited a jovial mood, almost like one barfly propositioning another, as if unaware of his surroundings and unmindful of the future. "Great work on that Starblazer launch system. Radical design."

Cooper smiled uncertainly. "Actually, it uses proven Apollo technology and standard aircraft manufacturing techniques--"

"That's the radical part! NASA is so conservative in the way it constantly strives for cutting-edge technology. You're far-sighted enough to dig into the past and use boldly primitive hardware."

"Well, I..." Cooper frowned. "Thank you." It had sounded like a compliment.

Gibbon told him that though the second generation Space Shuttle could conceivably open the cosmos to all kinds of low-cost payloads, the need currently existed for launch systems to supplement the capabilities even of NASA's workhorse spacecraft. "The buzz around NASA is that they're offering contracts to develop a line of cheap, small boosters. Starblazer fits the bill, I'd say. Wouldn't you?"

Cooper felt very hot, as if the convention hall atmosphere had turned strangely hellish. He stared at the grey man who leaned too close to him and could only reply, "Starblazer has payload configurations, but I envisioned it more as a passenger spacecraft."

"Any crewed spaceship design can be modified into a booster." He intercepted a glass of wine from one of the circulating trays, then glanced around the room with a conspiratorial look. "I'll let you know when the bid comes up. I can't say I'll give you advance warning, but if you started thinking about designs to boost ten thousand pounds to low Earth orbit at a cost of under five hundred dollars a pound, you might have a jump on the rest when it's time to submit."

"My design already offers a payload of nearly fourteen thousand pounds for a cost of twenty dollars a pound."

Gibbon laid an arm around his shoulder. "No one's going to believe those figures, boy! We're talking about people who know the cost of a Shuttle payload is well over fifteen hundred dollars a pound! Sure, NASA subsidizes it to bring the charge down to four hundred million a flight instead of a billion, but no one's going to believe you can send up a satellite for three hundred grand! They're used to cost overruns, so put a little flex into your figures. Make it look realistic." He pointed a finger at Cooper and squeezed off a shot. "That's a hint from someone who's been watching these guys for years."

True to his word, Gibbon called Cooper the following week with the news: NASA had officially opened bids for a new generation of rocket booster to complement the Shuttle. Cooper, Brodsky, and the other partners in Freespace worked overtime for the next half-year, sometimes with no pay, to prepare a detailed bid for NASA. The design of Starblazer mutated several times during the process. To meet NASA's requirements for safety and redundancy and the Air Force's demands for other bells and whistles, the spaceship grew fatter, heavier, less powerful, more expensive. With every increase in drag-inducing size and payload-shrinking weight, Cooper had to increase chamber pressure in the engines, something that forced him to design in more exotic materials.

In an effort to anticipate what would please NASA panelists, he radically redesigned Starblazer to use a pair of solid rocket motors similar to those on the Shuttle, but smaller. With his mind ever on safety, he designed them as hybrids: solid fuel with liquid oxygen pumped in as oxidizer. That way, if there were ever a need to shut off the engines, one needed merely to shut off the LOX flow. Such a capability might have saved the shuttle Challenger years back, he ruefully mused, but no one had listened to such reasoning at the time.

Unfortunately, hybrid rockets did not possess enough specific thrust to power an SSTO spacecraft, so the design now called out for hybrids to serve as boosters, with the main stage still utilyzing the LOX/LH2 propellant.

Cooper spent long nights in tortured thought, watching his brainchild grow lumpy and ugly, wondering if the prize -- a NASA contract to build a prototype -- was worth the torment.

Seven months after the major redesign, the agony ended. Including design spec sheets, the bid weighed in at just under two thousand pages. Starblazer's payload had shrunk to ten thousand pounds and the cost increased to four hundred-fifty dollars per pound. Freespace submitted it to NASA, then waited.

During the subsequent months, Cooper carried both designs to meetings at corporations involved in the business of putting satellites into orbit. They scoffed at the design built to NASA specs, and dismissed completely the original concept. The responses were maddening:

"How can you charge so little when something as advanced as the Shuttle charges so much?"

"The Shuttle charges may be higher, but it's up and running."

"The Shuttle charges are, on a net basis, lower than the cost of the actual flight as opposed to Starblazer's charge versus cost due to NASA subsidizing a portion of the Shuttle expense. How can you compete with that, fiscally speaking?"

"How can you say your development costs would be so low? Look at the billions spent on the Shuttle!"

"Two hundred million just to build a prototype? But the Shuttle had no development costs -- the government paid for it!"

"NASA wouldn't permit you just to up and launch a rocket, would they? Isn't there some law against that?"

"What if Starblazer blew up? Even NASA lost a shuttle a few years ago with that Challenger thing, didn't they? And we know NASA's primary concern is safety."

"This whole launch system of yours wouldn't keep very many people employed, would it? Our managers are used to overseeing thousands of workers, not a couple hundred. It would be a step down for them, don't you see?"

Worst of all, Cooper lost several of his most faithful investors. They assumed that he lay within reach of a NASA grant and hence no longer needed their contributions. They shifted their investments to even smaller companies on the farther fringes of the ærospace industry. While waiting to hear back from NASA, Cooper furloughed three draftsmen and the receptionist. He answered the phones himself, though the phones seldom rang; he cut back to one phone.

He glanced around the office of Freespace Orbital. It consisted of a thirty-by-twenty foot room on the seventh floor of a five-year-old building in downtown Palo Alto, near the beating heart of the erstwhile California giant once called Silicon Valley. Split eight ways by light blue room dividers, the modest office had a year ago served as home to five partners, including Cooper and Brodsky. Together, their combined talents and knowledge could easily have hurled a spacecraft into orbit but for one major shortfall: funding. That was what the NASA contract would have provided.

Freespace Orbital existed as an all-or-nothing enterprise. It needed money -- lots of it -- to perform its function. Without that money, it was nothing. Unlike an architect, who could design gas stations or homes while waiting for a skyscraper contract, spacecraft designer Gerald Cooper and his co-workers had no smaller jobs available to them. So they worked in the office for minimal salaries while Cooper, their senior partner, scrambled for that elusive contract that would finally reward them for their devotion and transform Freespace Orbital into a functioning commercial launch system.

For more than a decade Freespace Orbital had existed like a street waif with its nose pressed against the window of a posh restaurant, watching the sumptuous feast served to the huge ærospace contractors while not a crumb fell to the cold outdoors. Not that they wanted part of NASA's feast, though. Cooper merely wanted to start his own stand on the sidewalk. NASA, however, had finally managed to upset his cart.

Now -- thirteen months after Gibbon first approached him, Cooper stared at the letter on official NASA stationery. It was actually a photocopied form letter thanking him for his participation in the Medium Booster Vehicle Development Program. The bid had gone to General Aerospace for a scaled-down version of their Goliath III intercontinental ballistic missile. Cooper stared at the short précis of ga's bid. He showed it to Thom Brodsky, his partner and friend. Brodsky was a man of average height, with dark, short hair and thick glasses behind which hung a perpetually puzzled frown.

"Liars," he muttered after glancing at the figures. "It'll cost ten times that."

"Yes," Cooper said, "but they're liars with a NASA contract and we're honest with nothing but overdue bills to show for it." He took the letter back and laid it in a file folder. "What I can't understand is how they nabbed the contract. Even lying, their figures were double ours."

Brodsky shook his head. "Gerry -- Ludlow Woolsey III chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that controls NASA's purse strings. He's from Utah. ga is based in Utah. ga will employ ten thousand people to build the Goliath III-C. We're in California. We'd employ five hundred. Didn't Barry Gibbon tell you to be realistic?"

Cooper's jaw tightened; he picked up a paper clip and worried it to pieces. "The realism is that we don't have any more money to go on. We're in a business that requires us to produce a product before anyone invests in it, but we need hundreds of millions in investment capital before we can build the product. And no one -- no one -- wants to part with that kind of money on faith. No one wants to donate surplus, no one wants to donate time. Except you and the others here." He stared at his friend for a long silent moment, then asked, "Why are you here, Thom?"

Brodsky smiled. "Because there's no place I'd rather be. Because I don't think this is a lost cause. And even if I did, I think lost causes may be the only ones worth fighting for, since the causes that seem to win are the worst ones possible. And you buy us doughnuts."

Cooper laughed. Thom could do that to him, even in the darkest hours. "They may have to be day-old doughnuts from now on."

The office door swung wide. Both men looked up to see Sherry Cooper burst in, her long blond hair hanging down as if she had not bothered to care for it that morning.

"Those bastards!" she cried out.

"What is it, Sherry?" Cooper asked.

"The United Nations is considering something called the Interplanetary Treaty!"

Brodsky laughed. "Sounds typically pompous and lame-brained. What is it?"

"It puts all spacecraft and satellites under UN control. It wipes out private spaceflight!"

Gerry waved a hand in dismissal. "They tried that years ago with the Moon Treaty. It didn't work. The US vetoed it."

"There's a difference this time," she said, trying to regain her breath.

"What?"

"It was written by Barry Gibbon."

Thom and Gerry stared at her with faces like poleaxed steers.


5 February

Jackson Lundy contemplated the memo on his desk. He had known for a year that it was coming, and it annoyed him to no end. As the man charged with ensuring the safety of the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, the memo from upstairs was nothing more than a slap in the face. In terse bureaucratese, the waiver dismissed defects found in the current shipment of Solid Rocket Booster ignition systems and granted approval for their use on subsequent Shuttle flights.

Lundy had seen this before. He was a veteran of NASA and had lived through the nightmares of both Apollo 204 and Challenger. Here he saw another disaster waiting to happen: only if both SRB's ignited within microseconds of each other would the Shuttle launch safely. Unsynchronized ignition could lead to a bad trajectory. Or worse.

An overwhelming concern for safety dominated the early shuttle designs. One by one, Lundy had seen them dropped. At one time, every single piece of hardware possessed an enormous paper trail documenting its history. Over time, this procedure declined -- and so did NASA. This was not the agency he had worked for in the days of the Mercury program. He continued to work, though, laboring as much as he could to maintain whatever margin of safety was permissible.

He ran a hand through his shock of silver-grey hair and re-read the memo. Another loss for him, another deadly error covered up with paper, another time-bomb set ticking with the stroke of a pen.

They learned nothing from Challenger, he thought. Except maybe a few new ways to deflect blame.

There already existed evidence of ignition delays bordering on dissynchrony on several flights. Yet every time a launch just barely succeeded, it proved to management the validity of their opinions. "Look, Jack," one of them once said when Lundy showed computer readouts pointing to an incipient dissynchrony, "you're telling me it's unsafe because there was almost a misfire. I'm telling you it's safe because there wasn't! Remember the weird power spikes we used to get at one minute, seven seconds? We didn't do anything about them and they eventually went away."

Every argument ended there. We haven't lost another Shuttle yet, therefore it's still a safe system.

He took a sip of coffee from an old stained cup emblazoned with the Apollo 11 mission emblem. The ceramic had crazed over the years, covering the eagle and the Moon with a network of small cracks and fissures. He stared at it for a moment before returning morosely to his work.

* * *

Lundy lived in an older section of Cocoa Beach, in the same house he and his wife bought when they married thirty-three years before. He sat in his home office -- converted from a family room after their second son, Neil Armstrong Lundy, left for college -- and marveled that a third of a century had passed in this place. The palm tree seeds he had planted along the entry walk the week their first son, Alan Shepard Lundy, was born now towered forty feet high. The house, so fresh and new and... Floridian when they first moved in now stood in need of a good re-stuccoing. Cracks had appeared in its foundation a decade ago, but neither he nor Melissa could tolerate the upheaval in their lives that a major rebuild would cause. And neither could conceive of moving anywhere else. They, like the agency they both worked for, lay stuck in a rut, gazing on a dim goal with inexorably narrowing tunnel vision.

Lundy removed his ebony-framed reading glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. This wasn't good. Launch pressure. He had felt it so many times before. Every time it grew worse. He could not decide whether it was middle age (his own or NASA's) or simply that things were indeed growing worse for the agency.

After the demoralizing, soul-wrenching tragedy of Challenger, NASA recovered slowly. It took nearly three years for the agency to return to Space, thirty-two months of agonizing scrutiny and reorganization. And in the end...

Lundy slid his glasses back on.

...nothing had changed. The people responsible for the original compromises that resulted in the Shuttle Transportation System were brought back to "heal" the organization. They healed nothing, only covered up the cancer with plastic surgery; they made minor -- though costly -- changes to the booster design, developed an expensive escape system that would be absolutely useless in a Challenger-style accident -- indeed, would be useless during ninety per cent of the shuttle's flight regime -- and spent billions to build two new orbiters: Endeavour a few years ago, and now Constitution, scheduled to fly in six months.

Nothing had changed. The STS still utilized over eight hundred Criticality One components. They had no backup components-- they were, by definition, non-redundant items. If any one of them failed, at some certain point of the flight regime, it would result in catastrophic failure of the spaceship. Death and destruction as violent as Challenger.

Keys jangled in the front door. The office sat just off the foyer, so he heard Melissa's return clearly.

"Incoming Missile!" he called out. He had greeted her with that ritual phrase since they began dating, back when a young president offered the promise of a new frontier. With her flaming hair she looked like the rocket's red glare of poem and song. Even now, over fifty, she was still a firecracker: slender, tall -- in heels, taller than he -- her shapely form discernible beneath the white lab coat she wore. A British racing green turtleneck sweater covered her throat -- the only part of her about which she felt self-conscious. Her gorgeous mane of red hair draped down her back, only partially humbled into a pony-tail. She threw her keys onto her own desk that sat on the opposite side of Jack's, facing him.

Mumbling a response to Jack's greeting, she slid her laptop computer into its home base, awakening it from its sleep mode in the process.

"Hard day?" he asked.

She shook her head. "What do you think? Now Garibaldi tells me that the success of Biosphere Three obviates the need for any more research on NASA's part. 'If we need it, we'll buy it from them' he says."

"This is the same guy who said the failure of Biosphere Two meant that research by NASA would be a similar dead end?"

Melissa smiled and nodded. "He just thinks molecular sieves are a more elegant way to scrub atmosphere." She leaned back in the chair and ran a long-nailed forefinger delicately under her left eye to wipe away a tear caused by her contact lens. She did so without disturbing the perfect edge of eyeliner that ran under the mascara-bordered lower lashes. Though more than most women wore these days, none of her eye makeup seemed excessive on her; it simply accentuated, as the best makeup should, her large, lovely green eyes.

She keyed in a password that summoned up a research file. Her days belonged to her vocation at NASA's life systems engineering department. Evenings and weekends she spent pursuing her avocation.

"Anything interesting go extinct today?" Jack asked.

She searched through the e-mail the computer had downloaded for her during the previous night. "Another frog. We're losing a lot of amphibians. Gari thinks it's because of ozone depletion."

"Yeah, well, I wish he'd stop blaming Man for the way evolution operates. Species went extinct long before we were around. What's happening now's nothing compared to the dinosaur die-off. Did you get any DNA samples?"

Melissa made a tsking sound. "No, darn it. These guys seem to vanish before anyone notices they're missing."

Jack said nothing. He had heard similar disappointing news over the years concerning The Ark Society's attempts to create genome records for endangered species. The idea -- noble yet futile, Jack thought -- was to decipher and store animal and plant genetic codes so that at some future date (technology willing) the lost species could be recreated in a world restored (by some fantastic and conveniently undiscussed means) to more hospitable surroundings. Melissa worked on the project with a missionary zeal, beginning a few years ago when Alan left home to join the Space Command (which title always brought a sardonic grin to Jack's lips) and Neil entered high school. So far, The Ark Society had decoded and preserved the DNA of over twelve hundred endangered species, ranging from spotted owls to sperm whales to assorted rain forest flowers, mosses, bugs, and slime molds.

The Society had its limits, though. When someone suggested that they record the genome of the smallpox virus before the Centers for Disease Control destroyed the only remaining samples, he was nixed: the CDC refused to release a sample and the Society did not want to give the future a genetic blueprint for building a biological weapon.

Jack thought it a prejudicial attitude, based more on æsthetics than morality. The biosphere of Earth overflowed with dangerous life. Why save a poisonous tree-frog? Or a man-eating tiger, for that matter?

For the most part, though, Jack admired his wife's enthusiasm in something for which she chose to work and fight. She had appeared twice before Congress to argue for the abolition of laws regulating genetic research, laws that unintentionally hampered The Ark Society's above-ground research while doing nothing to inhibit the nuts working clandestinely to engineer bizarre new life forms. Her view prevailed both times.

He wondered, gazing at his wife with adoration, if she merely seduced them into voting for the beautiful redhead with the coy eyes? Knowing of the satyriasis of congressmen such as Ludlow Woolsey (both père in the Senate and fils in the House) and Zachary Taylor Peck, he was certain she had convinced them more by looks than by logic.

He had never appeared before Congress, though he considered NASA to be something for which he would work and fight. Not NASA itself, but the integrity of NASA, the purity of the space program. After more than thirty-five years, though, he felt ready to throw in the towel.

"Missile..."

"Yes, Jack?" She looked up and smiled at him, still typing rapidly.

"No one wants to talk about dissynchrony. The project manager at Hayes Poly says the SRB's are fine; any problem would be in software. The launch software has never gone through a risk-assessment procedure. The software people insist that the software is incapable of separating ignition commands; only a bad fuel bead could cause it.

"I'm afraid I see another Challenger coming."

Melissa kept typing. "What has Iggy done about it?"

"He doesn't care any more. It's as if he's off in some other place."

"Find out where it is. Maybe we can join him."

"I've thought about it," he said. "Thought about chucking it all. Remember when we started? It looked as if we were on the threshold of Space. You and I."

Melissa stopped typing to gaze at him. With a smile that revealed no hint of regret, only of warm nostalgia, she said, "We were going to live in orbit, maybe homestead a little crater on the Moon..."

"Occasional visits to Earth, just so our kids could appreciate what they had." He reached across the facing desk to entwine the fingers of a hand in hers. Her skin felt as smooth and soft as he remembered at their first touch.

She sighed. That was where the sound of wistfulness dwelt. "After Gemini. That's when I remember first realizing it wouldn't happen. You, you optimist, it took you until Skylab to see the handwriting."

He nodded and released her hand, suddenly more glum than when he began. "That's why it's so hard to go on. I'm just pretending at hope now."

She rose and stepped over to his side of the desk. Gentle hands massaged his shoulders, long nails stroked his neck, strong fingers ran through his greying hair. Her slender waist bent, she whispered in his ear through red, full lips.

"Don't give up the starship, my love. We've got another thirty years in us at least. It's going to happen sometime. It has to. If it's possible to do, it will be done."

"Who'll do it, though?" Jack's voice was suddenly urgent. Old, it sounded to her, and filled with a half-century of broken dreams. "Who'll do it?"


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