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The S-IVB would send the spacecraft toward the Moon. Just like the landing missions. But, once exhausted, the third stage wouldn’t be discarded. The Apollo would decouple and dock with the empty stage via the airlock adapter. The stack would follow a long, lower-energy trajectory to the Moon: a day and a half more than the three-day landing flights. Then the Apollo Service Module’s main engine would be used to brake the whole stack into lunar orbit.
The empty stage would have the same weight and dynamic characteristics, roughly, as a loaded LM. So an Apollo would indeed be able to deliver it to lunar orbit. The only modifications needed for the S-IVB would be the usual passivation and neutralization kit – equipment to turn the stage from a dry fuel can into a working station – and equipment brackets and pallets. Enough supplies could be carried for a four-week stay in lunar orbit, and the station would be refurbished for later crews.
As he read, Stone began to see the feasibility of it. It could, he realized, be done. But …
‘Why?’
Jones looked up from his own reading; Seger fixed Stone with a glare.
‘Why what?’
‘Why are we doing this, Bert? It’s just a stunt. We’ll have to cut out so much to save weight we’ll be compromising a lot of our science objectives for Skylab B.’
‘I know about the science, Phil. But we can send all that stuff up on the second crew flight, can’t we? And your flight will simply turn into a more limited engineering trip, with less emphasis on the science.’ Seger was a thin, intense man, with black, slicked-back hair and an Irish darkness; Stone found him unnerving. ‘If you’re in my chair, Phil, you have to look at the benefits for the program as a whole. Beyond your one mission alone. Yes, it will be a stunt. But a hell of a stunt. It will put us right back on top of everything …’
Jones talked now about the training they’d already completed toward their Earth-orbital mission. ‘And what about the Russians?’ The Soviets were proposing to dock a Soyuz ship with Skylab B in Earth orbit. ‘Changing that stunt around to a lunar-orbit rendezvous mission is a hell of a trick,’ Jones said. ‘I mean, the Russkies haven’t lifted a single cosmonaut out of Earth orbit yet.’
‘The Soviets still say they’ll have at least a circumlunar capability in a couple of years – within the life of the station,’ Seger said. ‘So we can get around that. And even if we can’t, maybe we could downgrade the Russian thing into a simple dock with an Apollo in Earth orbit. Anyhow, never mind the damn Russians. Chuck, you’ll be hanging out over the edge. Fitting out a station in lunar orbit. Nobody’s done anything remotely like that before. I thought a challenge might appeal.’
Jones looked thoughtful.
Stone knew Seger was pressing the right buttons, as far as Jones was concerned. The thought depressed him.
Stone could see Seger’s point, to some extent. Morale in NASA had been low, paradoxically, since the Mars decision. A lot of staff had been geared up to the abandoned Space Shuttle program, which they’d seen as new and exciting, technically; by comparison, the Skylabs looked like an extension of 1963 state-of-the-art. And the continuing budget cuts had put endless pressure on the Agency’s ambitions.
If you counted contract staff, only a hundred thousand people were still working on space programs, compared to a peak of half a million during Apollo. There had even been a program of terminations, at Houston, Marshall and the other main centers.
Meanwhile NASA had run into a lot of flak over the first orbital workshop, Skylab A. Pete Conrad had led the first set-up mission to open up Skylab. But then the second crew had been military, a consolation for the DoD after the Shuttle cancelation. Ken Mattingly, an Apollo veteran, had led a crew of military astronauts – Manned Spaceflight Engineers – through a secretive program testing ‘Terra Scout’ and ‘Battleview’ surveillance equipment, radiation monitoring gear, encrypted communications beams. Every previous NASA flight had been completely open; it had been a deliberate and popular policy going back to Kennedy.
And, meanwhile, US intelligence had learned that Soviet cosmonauts in Salyuts had overseen military exercises in Eastern Siberia, sending down real-time tactical information to battlefield commanders.
A lot of people thought this militarization of space was a deeply shitty development, a fall away from the dream of Apollo. And Jack Kennedy had attacked it, publicly.
So maybe Seger was right that a morale-raising stunt was a good idea at this point. But it would be a stunt.
Stone had a military background himself. But he hadn’t come into the space program to play spies in space, or to fly stunts. For him, this proposal was a sour compromise. Screw the science, for the sake of the politics. Just like the old days.
And, to him, it didn’t say a lot for Seger’s sound judgment.
Now Seger cut the discussion short. ‘Chuck, Phil, every so often you’ve got to take a chance like this. To go back to the Moon so soon would be a hell of a thing for us. A hell of a thing. The nation needs a boost right now: why, you’ve got two White House aides testifying in the Senate against the President right this minute. And as for the risks, remember, they flew Apollo 8 to the Moon and back on only the second manned Apollo, the first manned Saturn V, and the first V to fly after the unmanned Apollo 6, which was a shambles …’
Stone understood now. Seger had been reading his history. This is Bert’s Apollo 8. Back to the Moon! A grandiose stunt: a way to make his mark. And Skylab B is to be sacrificed for it.
Seger was saying, ‘Just think what a hell of a lift it will give us when you’re successful …’
‘If, Bert,’ Jones said. ‘If.’
When he’d thought it over, Stone still wasn’t happy.
But he wanted to fly in space. If he was going to have to swallow this ill-thought-out, gung ho crap to do it, then that was the price he would pay.
And anyhow – Stone reflected, in the midst of the revised, hectic training schedule – he kind of liked the idea of going to the Moon …
Friday, July 20, 1973 Mason City, Iowa
The piece was splashed over the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post. Ralph Gershon sat in the public library of his home town, reading it over and over.
… American B-52 bombers dropped about 104,000 tons of explosives on Communist sanctuaries in neutralist Cambodia during a series of raids in 1969 and 1970 … The secret bombing was acknowledged by the Pentagon the Monday after a former Air Force major described how he falsified reports on Cambodia air operations and destroyed records on the bombing missions actually flown …
Ralph Gershon felt a deep satisfaction. At last it was coming out.
He was convinced all that covert crap had worked against his career progression in the years since. Maybe it had also killed off the tentative feelers he’d put out about getting into the space program. That and the color of his goddamn skin. Maybe there were people afraid of what he might say, if he got to be a public figure, right? Well, now at last it was all going to be out in the open, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
He made his decision, sitting there in the musty heat of the library’s reference section, with some old guy opposite him drooling in his sleep. As soon as he got back to his squadron he’d start progressing a new application to NASA.
Before he got up he read some more about how Ehrlichman and Haldeman were going to have to testify in front of the Senate. At last, he thought: at last that asshole Nixon was getting his.
Erosion by Catastrophic Floods on Mars and Earth