Authors: Stephen Baxter
The sun, rising above the silhouetted shoulders of
Challenger,
was surrounded by an elliptical patch of yellow light, suspended in a brown sky. It looked unreal.
The sun was small, feeble, only two-thirds of its size as seen from Earth.
She shivered, involuntarily, although she knew that her suit temperature couldn’t have varied; the shrunken sun, the lightless sky, made Mars seem a cold, remote place.
She turned around, letting her camera pan across the landscape. The Martian dust felt a little slippery under her boots as she turned.
She stepped further away from
Challenger
, her line of footprints extending on into the virgin regolith. She felt as if the long, thin line of communications attaching her to
Challenger
and her home planet was growing more attenuated, perhaps fraying, leaving her stranded on this high, cool plain.
The land wasn’t completely flat, she saw now as the light continued to increase; there was a subtle mottling in the shading. And she made out what looked like low sand dunes, off to the west. But the dunes were more irregular than terrestrial sand dunes, because, she guessed, of the small size of the surface particles; the dunes were actually more like drifts in the dust.
Away to the west, she saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge, facing away from her.
She walked forward, further from the MEM.
After perhaps fifty yards she came to the ridge. It turned out to be the lip of a small crater, quite sharply defined, a few dozen yards across, embedded in the floor. But the crater walls were worn, and there was a teardrop-shaped mound behind it.
That mound had to be an erosional remnant, streamlined like the remnants found in terrestrial braided streams. And she thought she could see stratification in the sides of the remnant. It was just like the scablands, after all.
She began to step down into the crater, clumsily; her legs were stiff, and dust swirled up around her, sticking to her legs and her HUT.
Her faceplate was misted up, her breath rapid. She leaned forward.
In the lee of the crater rim, something sparkled, something that finally banished the lunar ghosts of Armstrong and Muldoon from this moment, something that made her feel that her life’s circle had closed, at last.
I guess I got to step into the picture after all
.
It was frost.
She leaned sideways, and stretched down to the crater’s floor,
awkwardly. She scraped at the dust with her fingers. Her fingers cut easily into the surface, leaving sharp trench marks.
I’m like a kid, digging on a beach. A planet-wide beach
. Everywhere she dug, she found the same soft, powdery surface, the same cohesiveness, what looked like pebbles.
She lifted her glove to her face, to get a closer look at the dirt. It was oddly frustrating. The bit of regolith was very light, so light she couldn’t even feel its weight. She couldn’t even feel its texture because of the thickness of her clumsy suit. And the glare of the rising sun in her glass faceplate made it difficult to see, and the whir of pumps, the hiss of the radio, cut her off from whatever thin sounds were carried by the Martian winds.
She had a sense of unreality, of isolation. She was
here,
but she was still cut off from Mars. It wasn’t like a field trip at all.
She closed her fingers over the sample; the little ‘pebbles’ burst and shattered. They were just fragments of a caliche-like duricrust.
She tipped her hand and let the crushed dust drift back to the surface; much of it clung to the palm of her glove, turning it a rust-brown.
She took the diamond marker out from the sample pocket on her suit. She held the little coin in her hand; it caught the sunlight and refracted it, turning its glow to a bright scarlet, jewel-like, against the ochre of Mars.
She felt a sudden, and unexpected, surge of pride. She distrusted patriotism intensely; and maybe this expedition, these few days of scrambling over Mars like rabbits, really was all a grand technocratic folly. But the fact was that her country had – in little more than two centuries of existence – sent its citizens to walk on the surfaces of two new worlds.
And if some calamity were to wipe Earth clean of life before anyone decided to come again, this little marker, with its flag, would still be here, as a monument to a magnificent human achievement: this, and the remnants of
Challenger,
and three Lunar Module descent stages on the surface of the Moon.
And to think we nearly didn’t come here; to think, after Apollo, we might have closed down the space program
.
Carefully she dropped the marker and let it float through the weak gravity down into the hole she’d dug, where it lay, sparkling, in the base of the crater.
Then, silently, she dug into her pocket again. With some difficulty, she drew out a small silver pin. Its 1960s design was tacky: a shooting star soaring upwards, a long, comet-like tail.
For you, Ben
.
She dropped the pin into the little ditch, after the diamond marker. Then she kicked dust back into the hole, and scuffed over the surface.
The footprints Armstrong and Muldoon had left behind on the Moon’s surface were still there – would remain there for many millions of years, until micrometeorite erosion finally obliterated them. But it was different here. The prints she was making today would last for many months, perhaps years; but eventually the wind would cover them over.
In a few years her footprints would be erased by the wind, the first little pit she’d dug all but untraceable.
‘… Natalie?’
She hadn’t said anything, she realized.
She turned to
Challenger
. The human artifact was a squat, white-painted toy, diminished by the distance she had come; the sun made the sky glow behind it. She could still see the pearl-gray interior of the airlock, embedded at the center of the MEM, and above that she could make out the fat cylinder of the ascent stage, with its propellant tanks clustered like berries around a stalk.
There was a single set of footsteps, crisp in the duricrust, leading from
Challenger
to where she stood, beyond the circular splash of dust from the MEM’s landing rocket. They looked like the first steps on a beach after a receded tide; they were the only footsteps on the planet.
By God, she thought, we’re here. We came for all the wrong reasons, and by all the wrong methods, but we’re here, and that’s all that matters. And we’ve found soil, and sunlight, and air, and water
.
She said: ‘I’m home.’
In our world,
Challenger
was the name – not of a Mars lander – but of the Shuttle orbiter which was destroyed in January 1986, killing its crew of seven. It was a disaster which brought the US space program, in 1986, to a nadir, rather than the new zenith of a Mars landing.
But it might have been very different.
After the liftoff of Apollo 11 in July
1969,
an exuberant Vice President Spiro Agnew proclaimed that the US ‘should articulate a simple, ambitious, optimistic goal of a manned flight to Mars by the end of the century.’ And NASA had strong, feasible plans to achieve that goal.
America has never been so close again to assembling the commitment to go to Mars.
What went wrong in 1969? Why did President Nixon decide
against
the Mars option?
And how would things have worked out, in an alternate universe in which Natalie York walked on Mars?
In February 1969, a few months before the first Apollo Moon landing, the incoming Nixon Administration appointed a Space Task Group (STG), chaired by Vice President Agnew, to develop goals for the post-Apollo period. The STG was to report to the President in September. (President Nixon’s initiating memo was similar to that reproduced in the novel – but
without
the handwritten addendum …)
Post-Apollo planning for space entered its most crucial months. And gradually, over this period, NASA lost the case for Mars.
To space proponents in 1969,
technical
logic appeared to indicate a building from the achievements of Apollo to a progressive colonization of the Solar System, including missions to Mars. But the
political
logic differed.
The Apollo era – when the efforts of half a million Americans had been devoted to spaceflight – had been born out of an extraordinary set of circumstances, which were not repeated in 1969. Just a week after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first spaceflight in April 1961, President Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Johnson asking for options: ‘Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win? …’
Although NASA by this time already had a schedule for a lunar program, there was no overriding logic favoring the Moon goal.
In fact, in private, Kennedy berated his technical advisers for not producing recommendations for more tangible, down-to-Earth scientific spectaculars, such as desalinating sea water.
So when Kennedy made his famous 1961 commitment to put a man on the Moon within a decade, the new program was not intended as a first step in an orderly expansion into space. Rather, Kennedy was reacting, to the early Soviet lead in spaceflight, and his Administration’s Bay of Pigs disaster.
Thus, in 1969, there was
no
internal logic which proceeded from Apollo to Mars. This key point was evidently misunderstood by many within NASA in this period. Technically Apollo was an end in itself, a system designed to place two men on the Moon for three days, and it achieved precisely that; its political goals were similarly well-defined – to beat the Soviets in space – and had been achieved. With the completion of Apollo, there was no momentum to be carried forward to future goals – and, in 1969, no perceived threat to drive the necessary political reaction behind a new program.
Still, NASA had explored the technical feasibility of a Mars mission in as many as sixty study contracts between 1961 and 1968. But the visionaries were dealt a severe blow when the pictures of Mars returned by the early Mariners showed a bleak lunar-like cratered landscape. There were still compelling scientific reasons to go to Mars, but the opportunity for human expansion was clearly limited. NASA suffered deferments and cancelations as a result.
Meanwhile, throughout the Apollo period, NASA’s overall long-range planning was weak, leaving it ill-prepared for 1969.
This was in fact a deliberate policy of James Webb, NASA Administrator from 1961 to 1968. Webb believed that Apollo’s success would give US citizens great pride and encouragement, and that any evidence of commitment to an expensive long-term Mars program would lose NASA the margin of strength needed to finish Apollo.
As early as 1966, NASA budgets began to slide.
On September 16, 1968, after arguing with Johnson about the latest cuts, Webb resigned. When the STG began its work NASA’s only firm funding commitments for manned spaceflight were for the Apollo lunar landings and a follow-on Apollo Applications Program.
President Nixon himself was not an instinctive opponent of spaceflight. But – as new NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine learned as he flew with Nixon to Apollo 11’s splashdown – the
incoming Administration could not direct large amounts of money into space while the Vietnam War continued.
Given such strong signals, NASA’s political tactics during this key period, under Paine, showed deep naivety.
Although in its STG submission NASA formally called for such worthy goals as ‘commonality,’ ‘reusability,’ and ‘economy’ – the program it actually envisaged was outward-looking and very expensive, including a space station, a manned Mars mission, a new generation of automated spacecraft, and new programs in advanced research and technology. These tactics were counter-productive. Even supporters of more modest programs, given a Hobson’s choice of a huge Mars ‘boondoggle’ or nothing, backed away.
NASA also tried to talk up the benefits of state-managed R&D, but this too was a mistake. There was no doubt that NASA was an astonishing success as a giant technocratic exercise in management science and project control. And only a fifth of Kennedy’s 1961 speech had been devoted to spaceflight: Kennedy had been promoting the space program as part of a greater
technocratic
solution to perceived threats and problems – eliminating poverty, resisting Communist expansion, promoting development abroad.
But by 1969 it was clear that technocracy had failed in its greater objectives. Instead there was only the maturation of the power complex of the technocratic state. Nixon seemed to understand the anti-technocratic mood of his day, and also how technocracy was in opposition to America’s older Jeffersonian tradition of local politics and democratic responsiveness.
Meanwhile, during 1969, funding cuts were made in the NERVA nuclear rocket research program, which had been proceeding in Nevada since 1957. Although the Nevada test station would not be shut down until 1972, the 1969 cuts ended any hopes of flight testing nuclear rockets. Without NERVA, a component NASA believed was vital to a Mars expedition, the case for Mars was essentially already lost. (In the novel, NASA manages to fend off these cuts.)
Against this background – and without a strong and articulate champion, the role served by Jack Kennedy in the novel – the Agency was soon forced to back off from its more aggressive proposals. The language in NASA’s draft report to the STG, prepared in April 1969, read: ‘We
recommend
that the US begin preparing for a manned expedition to Mars at an early date.’ By the published version the sentence had been watered down to: ‘Manned expeditions to Mars
could
begin as early as 1981’ (my emphasis).
Agnew himself was, however, a champion within the White House of aiming for Mars – even though he was booed when he spoke of the project in public. White House counsel John Ehrlichman later described how he was unable to dissuade Agnew from including a 1981 landing in the STG’s list of recommendations, even though it was already clear that the Mars mission did not fit with the Nixon Administration’s overall budget priorities. Agnew insisted on taking the argument in to Nixon. We do not know what Nixon said to Agnew, but fifteen minutes later, Agnew called Ehrlichman to explain that the Mars mission was being moved from the list of ‘recommendations’ to another category headed ‘technically feasible.’
The proposals of the final STG report, as delivered to the President in September 1969, were much as depicted in the novel.
The STG proposed a series of common elements: a Shuttle, space station modules, a space tug, nuclear shuttles, and a Mars Excursion Module (MEM). The modules could be put together into a series of mission profiles to achieve a variety of goals; only the MEM would have been Mars-specific.
The earliest Mars mission would have left Earth on November 12, 1981, consisting of two nuclear-boosted ships each carrying six men. The expedition would return home on August 14, 1983, and the astronauts brought back to Earth by shuttles.
A series of funding options were presented, ranging from a maximum-pace sprint to Mars by 1982 to a lowest-level funding option which would curtail all manned flight after Apollo. Three central options were presented: Option I aiming for a 1984 Mars landing at a peak cost of $9bn per year, Option II for 1986 at $8bn/year, and Option III for no firm landing commitment at $5bn/year.
The STG proposals were designed to allow incremental near-term decision-making, while decisions on more ambitious programs – such as Mars – could be deferred.
It was widely expected that, given the heavy lobbying by NASA and the US aerospace industry, some elements at least of this vision would survive. But public and political reaction was swift and negative.
While it awaited Nixon’s formal response to the STG, further pressure on NASA came in the FY1971 budget process.
Facing further cuts, Paine scrambled to reprioritize. One Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) were the sole survivors of the Apollo Applications Program. Apollo 20 was canceled to
free up a Saturn V for Skylab. The remaining Apollo missions, 13 through 19, would be stretched out to place two missions after Skylab. There was no prospect of a post-Apollo lunar program. Viking was postponed to 1975.
In January 1970, Nixon somberly told Paine of a Harris poll reporting that 56% of Americans believed the costs of Apollo were too great. Nixon said he regretted cuts but could not make an expansive space program a priority. Paine, however, kept up pressure on the President for a greater commitment to NASA’s activities, and this led to hard feelings between them. White House officials concluded that: ‘We need a new Administrator who will turn down NASA’s empire-building fervor … someone who will work with us rather than against us, and … will shape the program to reflect credit on the President rather than embarrassment.’
In March 1970 Nixon formally endorsed the STG’s third and least expensive option. His language was cautious. ‘With the entire future and the entire universe before us … we should not try to do everything at once. Our approach to space must continue to be bold – but it must also be balanced.’
Nixon set out six specific objectives: the remaining Apollo missions, Skylab, greater international cooperation in space (essentially ASTP), reducing the cost of space operations (Space Shuttle studies), hastening space technology’s practical application, and unmanned planetary exploration. Nixon made mention of one ‘major
but long-range
goal we should keep in mind … to
eventually
send men to explore the planet Mars’ (my emphasis). Nixon distanced NASA organizationally from its Apollo past: ‘We must think of space activities as part of a continuing process … and not as a series of separate leaps, each one requiring a massive concentration of energy and will and accomplished on a crash timetable.’
Essentially, NASA had lost the argument for Mars, and Nixon had (provisionally) chosen the Space Shuttle. In this short but crucial statement, Nixon summarized virtually all of US space policy through the 1970s.
In the
Voyage
timeline, Nixon withdraws this statement before publication; after this crux point, history diverges decisively.
Even after Nixon’s response to the STG, the future of US manned spaceflight was far from assured. To save funds for future programs, on September 2, 1970 Paine cut two more Apollo missions. Paine was out of place in the Nixon Administration, and he resigned on September 15.
Congressional critics still wanted more of NASA’s budget
trimmed. The familiar partially-reusable Shuttle concept emerged in response to the need to halve development costs. But even this did not win automatic approval. In November 1971 the new NASA Administrator James Fletcher sent a testy memo to the President arguing that the US could not afford to forgo manned spaceflight altogether, that the Shuttle was the only meaningful new program that could be accomplished on a modest budget, and not starting the Shuttle would be highly damaging to the aerospace industry.
But Fletcher did not know that NASA had gained a powerful ally inside the Administration in Caspar Weinberger, Deputy Director of the
Office
of Management and Budget, who wrote to Nixon on August 12, 1971 in support of the Space Shuttle
(not
of a Mars program!). NASA’s budget was still under threat simply because it was cuttable, Weinberger said. Further NASA cuts would confirm ‘that our best years are behind us, that we are turning inwards, reducing our defense commitments, and voluntarily starting to give up our superpower status and our desire to maintain world superiority.’ In a handwritten scrawl on the memo, Nixon added, ‘I agree with Cap.’
In December 1971 Fletcher learned that Nixon had decided in principle to go ahead with the Shuttle. The decisive factors were the arguments put forward in Weinberger’s and Fletcher’s memos, the fact that so many high-technology programs had already been cut, and – given the decision already to cancel the proposed Supersonic Transport (SST) project – the desire to start some new aerospace program that would avoid unemployment in critical states in the 1972 election year.
On January, 5 1972 Nixon issued a statement announcing the decision to proceed with the development of ‘an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980s and ’90s …’