Can John Glenn Do It Again?
Long ago he saved America from losing the space race to the Russians. Now the 77-year-old astronaut has a new mission: saving NASA.
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Meanwhile the rest of the JSC is furiously straining to organize the assembly of the new station, a process that resembles birthing an elephant. Listen to Randy Brinkley, a burly former Marine who has the job of overseeing the monster project: “An average day is I get up at three-thirty in the morning and then do e-mail from my home until about six o’clock. That’s kind of normal for me, because when I come to work, I don’t have time to check it. I mean, there’s usually a hundred e-mails a day.” Brinkley is a star at the JSC because he directed the mission that fixed the Hubble (saving the scientists’ overeducated rear ends). It was a tough assignment: The rescue mission required astronauts to spend more time outside the vehicle than ever attempted and handle highly precise instruments while wearing the equivalent of boxing gloves. There was intense pressure to succeed. “The credibility of NASA was on the line, as I was told on many occasions,” said Brinkley.
Brinkley’s current task is exponentially more complicated. When it’s all put together, the space station will resemble an immense dragonfly, thanks to an acre of solar panels that will fan out like wings on either side of its modular body. But at the moment, parts are being manufactured in far-flung locations all over the world. When President Reagan initiated the project, it was solely an American venture, but after President Clinton insisted it be redesigned to cost less, the station became an exercise in diplomacy, with sixteen nations, including Russia, now involved. To save money, various bits and pieces will be launched separately and then assembled in orbit 250 miles above Earth in a series of complex space walks that will turn the astronaut corps into a high-flying construction team. Heated objections have been raised by critics who feel this approach carries a risk to human life, but they have been overruled in the cause of economic efficiency.
The first component is slated to go up on a Russian rocket in November (though the launch date could slip again), and the second is scheduled to go up on a shuttle in December. Then the shuttle crew will perform the first of the construction jobs—attaching the Russian and American components and assembling some delicate antennae. At one point I mentioned that the assembly process sounded a bit difficult.
“Yeah,” said Brinkley. “It’s like thirty Hubble missions back-to-back.”
Even in its cheaper incarnation, the station chews through $2.1 billion in public funds a year, making it a political liability. “I try to put it into perspective for the average taxpayer,” said Brinkley. “The average amount of an individual’s tax dollars that goes to the international space station is nine dollars a year. So that’s the equivalent of a movie or a pizza. And all that money is invested here on Earth.” Russia’s ongoing economic troubles have forced NASA to cough up even more, which Goldin has obtained by transferring funds from space science or planetary exploration. On Capitol Hill the repeated delays threatened to morph into a crisis. Many politicians can think of other ways to spend $2.1 billion. On July 7, 1998, Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas made his annual bid to kill the ungainly project. His red power tie askew, Bumpers read damning comments from experts who thought the space station would accomplish little. “The veterans have been squealing like a pig under a gate about how they’ve been mistreated this year!” cried Bumpers. “Let’s put $1 billion towards veteran’s medicine and $450 million toward housing!”
John Glenn, in the final year of his fourth Senate term, took the floor in rebuttal. In contrast to Bumpers’ entertaining gyrations, Glenn dutifully recited a mind-numbing list of things the space station was supposed to accomplish, such as providing a good place to grow protein crystals, which could help pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs. In trumpeting the importance of Russian cooperation, Glenn casually mentioned his upcoming return to space and his celebrated first flight, when he became the first American ever to orbit the globe. “If you told me thirty-six years ago, when I made my first flight in 1962, that U.S. astronauts would take up residence in the Russian space station, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he added. “I’m a veteran of the cold war, and I could not be more pleased to see this progress.” The Bumpers amendment was defeated by a two-to-one margin, far greater than in years past, when the station barely squeaked through—clear evidence that Goldin’s efforts are paying off.
Even so, why America needs a space station remains a muddy issue—perhaps deliberately so. NASA typically says the project will help study questions of relevance here on Earth—such as the much-lauded protein crystals. Agency officials also argue for the station as a nifty way of keeping the Russians preoccupied with peaceful activity. In fact, what the station really seems to be is a fantastic laboratory for studying people as they spend long periods in zero gravity. In other words, it’s a good stepping stone for future missions—the kind that will take longer and go farther than the Apollo flights ever did. “The human species is going to leave Earth orbit,” Goldin declares. “America, of all countries, was founded by explorers. The space frontier is there, it’s calling to us, it’s the opportunity for future generations. And we’re not going to be a bunch of nerds operating robots. We’re going to have the next equivalent to the Mercury Seven. The Mars team.”
Mars or Bust
NASA HAS BEEN OBSESSED WITH GOING to Mars for decades, but not until two years ago, when scientists at the JSC claimed to have discovered evidence of primitive life forms in a Mars meteorite found in Antarctica, did Mars fever really sweep the agency. Features such as dry riverbeds suggest that Mars once had a warm, wet climate; understanding why it became a cold, dry place could shed light on the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere. But a Mars mission has always had its skeptics inside NASA, and not just for budgetary reasons. Scientists who have spent their careers studying solar flares and intergalactic cosmic radiation know that the tiny part of space that man has explored up to this point is kept free of such hazards by Earth’s magnetosphere, which extends well beyond the lunar orbit. A Mars mission would venture out from the protection of the magnetosphere and expose the crew to the perils of intense bursts of radiation released by solar storms.
After the discovery of possible life on Mars, Goldin reassigned a highly respected engineer named Doug Cooke from his job as deputy manager of the space station to work exclusively on getting a team to the Red Planet. “It gets mixed reactions,” Cooke said of his new post as manager of the exploration office. “People down in the trenches designing a widget, they may not see it as something that’s really going to happen. But most people in the space program are here because they want to do these things. Technically, it’s something we can do.”
Cooke and I met in Building 32, in the shadow of the JSC’s mammoth thermal vacuum chamber, where he showed me a crude mock-up of the TransHab, short for “transit habitat,” a potential Mars spacecraft. “It’s inflatable,” he explained. “The skin would create an internal volume that the crew would live within. So it’s basically like a big tire.” I confessed that the idea of an inflatable craft sounded preposterous. Where was the metal armor that had always shielded astronauts from the void of space? Cooke said he had reacted the same way at first but then changed his mind. Metal is heavy. A Mars trip would take two years: Even when Earth and Mars are closest together, it would take six months to get there, and then a crew would have to wait a full year for Earth to come close enough to permit the six-month journey home. Such a long time in space would wear heavily, so the governing idea of the TransHab is to give six astronauts the maximum room, while still keeping the weight of the craft low. The TransHab’s skin would be made of layers of materials including Kevlar, which is used to make bulletproof vests. “We’ve done a test with hypervelocity impact guns that shoot particles at the speed that this would get hit with in space,” said Cooke. “The particles did not get even to the bottom layer. It actually has a higher degree of protection for a given area than the space station modules.”
Cooke hopes to put the TransHab on the space station to test it further. “Once you’re on your way to Mars, there’s no way to come back until the scheduled time,” he noted. “So all of these systems are going to have to work. It makes a lot of sense to use the space station to work the bugs out of the system.” The JSC is aiming for a Mars mission early in the next century. “Obviously it waits until the country is willing to support it,” said Cooke, “but we’re trying to hold to a possible date of 2011 or 2014.”
How will NASA persuade the country to support a Mars mission? This summer the vast entertainment complex beside the JSC was plastered with orange banners touting Armageddon, a Hollywood confection in which NASA saves Earth from the mother of all asteroids. Anybody who missed Armageddon presumably caught Deep Impact, a slower movie with a similar plot. Now, three decades after he became the first American to circle the globe, John Glenn is about to perform a strange reprise of his first mission. And if Goldin has bet right, then we will all respond with a reprise of our original awe. Outer space is a realm the average person will never visit, where many of the familiar laws of physical reality do not apply. Space is alien, foreign, and almost beyond comprehension. Other than society’s growing reliance on satellite technology, the void beyond Earth plays no role in daily life. It’s a hard sell, in other words. NASA can try to seem relevant by talking about the practical applications of protein crystals, but really the only effective way for the agency to sell itself is to ask people to dream.
No matter what obstacles the political process or life itself puts in the way, Dan Goldin seems determined to badger the country into dreaming on a grand scale. On August 1 members of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs witnessed a poignant reminder that even heroes are mortal, when they gathered in Houston to attend the memorial service for Alan Shepard. Shepard’s friends smiled or blinked when they heard “Danny Boy,” his favorite song; outside, jets flew over in the missing man formation. Later I asked Goldin if being at the memorial for another Mercury crew member had made him fear for John Glenn’s health. “I just went to a birthday party for a friend of mine who’s eighty years old,” replied Goldin. “He runs a billion-dollar corporation, travels all over the world, and works sixteen hours a day. Where is it written that at sixty-five you should disappear out of society? God bless John Glenn.
“By the way, there wasn’t one astronaut there who didn’t come up to me and say, ‘Holy mackerel, isn’t it wonderful? Can I go next?’”
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