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It was the day before launch (L-1, in Nasa parlance) and I was going to Kennedy Space Center, or KSC, in Cape Canaveral, to watch what Nasa still calls the Space Transportation System (STS) - and the rest of the world calls the space shuttle - head for low Earth orbit (LEO). (Nasa is a constellation of acronyms and abbreviations, so many and so arcane that they take on a quasi-mystical quality - to quote one public-affairs officer (PAO), "We have all these wonderful acronyms... I can't remember what half of them mean.") The shuttle, ?ying for nearly 30 years now, ideally offers very little in the way of excitement - but with the whole programme slated for retirement in 2010, this mission (STS-126) was the last one scheduled to launch by night, and I'd been told to expect drama, the sky relit by a controlled explosion of rocket fuel turning night back into day.
The road to Canaveral was like a line across a ?at green mirror - trees, water, re?ections of trees - till nature gave way to the asphalt and advertising of the coast. I checked into the Cocoa Beach Hilton, went swimming and read Tom Wolfe's classic history of early cowboy-era space ?ight, The Right Stuff. Wolfe devotes some of his more scalding observations to the Cocoa Beach nightlife, full of contractors, street-racing astronauts and former Nazi rocket scientists who "materialised as if from out of a time warp... pummelling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the
'Horst Wessel Song' [the Third Reich's national anthem]!"
After sunset I crashed a prelaunch party happening on my hotel's deck. I walked in with no problem, a goofy/boozy atmosphere in effect - congressmen and contractors mingling and drinking. By a buffet, I heard a woman in a trilby, chest decorated with an illuminated brooch of Earth-orbiting LEDs, ask, "Are you the movie star?"
A man replied, suavely, "I was in a movie." "What movie?" "Office Space."
He then signed her ID badge: Ron Livingston. I introduced myself and asked what he was doing there. "I'm going into space. If a monkey can do it, they ?gure I can."
He gestured to the man next to him ("This is Bert from Nasa"), who invited me to a "night viewing" of the shuttle: the last public opportunity to get up close and see the thing illuminated on the launch platform before the following day's liftoff. "Come to the Residence Inn at midnight," Bert said.
On the bus to the viewing, I could see KSC's main landmark, the vehicle-assembly building (VAB), a towering white cube emblazoned with an American ?ag and a massive Nasa logo: a blue circle full of stars bisected by a forked red velocity trail, known, mysteriously, as "the meatball". After passing through security, we marvelled at KSC's time-capsule-like assemblage of mid-century buildings (like visiting the future and the 1960s simultaneously) and the juxtaposition of so much nature - white birds that looked like Egyptian ibises, reptilian marshes - and so much technology.
At the viewing site, Bert warned me, "Watch out for alligators."
Forty years earlier, in his book about Apollo, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer described this place, pad 39-A - the actual liftoff point from which the massive Saturn V rocket had carried America's astronauts to the Moon - as "a shrine... welcoming footsore travellers at dusk". In the distance, hydrogen over?ow was being burned off, calling to mind a ceremonial torch.
Later, when I found Bert from Nasa he was talking with "Nasa's 143rd employee" about someone called Neil. "Who's Neil?" I asked. "Neil Armstrong," Bert said. "You were standing right near him."
Nasa is now 50. The moonwalk was 40 years ago in July. The Nasa of yore did the unimaginable in eight years, making good on President Kennedy's assertion that "this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." It succeeded for two reasons: access to a staggering 4.4 per cent of the federal budget (now it's 0.5 per cent) and a national desire for Americans to believe in themselves - and in something more than themselves. Since then, Nasa, vision ?ickering, public imagination no longer enthralled, has stooped to offering belittling practical justi?cations for space ?ight (GPS, mobile phones, non-stick frying pans) that ground and practicalise the sublime, killing its poetry.
In explaining why space is worth exploring, as Nasa frequently
?nds itself doing, there's a mistaken supposition, because - as with anything of real value - the bene?ts are largely unknown. It's a philosophical matter, almost religious in its insolubility. Why do we need to love or live at all? The answer is in wondering. And Nasa is about wonder. Its last administrator, Michael Griffin, attempted to re-instill that wonder when he gave a series of soaring, sermon-like speeches, and asked, "What is the value to the United States of being involved in enterprises which lift up human hearts everywhere when we do them?" His answer: making the world unite. (Or, in ?awless Nasa-ese: doing "the kinds of things that make others want to work with us to do them".) But now, just a few decades into the endeavour, all is uncertainty. Barack Obama, a Kennedy-like president who wants Nasa to "inspire the world", took office; Griffin was let go. Nobody outside Nasa knows what the United States is doing in space.
The shuttle will stop ?ying in 2010, and the Russians will bring American astronauts into space for the following ?ve years.
Meanwhile, Nasa will embark on the Constellation programme, an Apollo-dwar?ng series of missions that entails going to the Moon, building a base and staying there before setting off for Mars. A Mars mission will last two-and-a-half years. A projected 520-day Mars simulation will begin in Moscow this year. Three thousand eight hundred people are currently employed in building Constellation equipment, including the enormous Ares V rocket, the largest ever - designed to produce 11.8 million lbs of thrust (that of 50 747s) and have us back to the Moon by 2020. (If the recession doesn't kill the programme ?rst - the Obama administration has just begun a review of Constellation.)
Nasa operates like its own country and, at its best, like countries don't even exist. The International Space Station, 669,000lbs of metal and tortillas 200 miles above you right now, assembled by former enemies, has been described as "the greatest engineering project in the history of mankind". But much as looking at the night sky clari?es the insigni?cance of mankind, looking at the federal budget clari?es the insigni?cance of Nasa. After the Americans beat the Russians, the US public lost interest in Apollo.
And the interest never really came back. Now, with Constellation's plans for some of the most astounding things ever done in space, the agency is on the cusp of either a period of renewed health - a redux - or something like extinction.
The day after the night viewing I headed for the press site, a building on a rise over-looking the launch pad, ?lled with desks that face a tall counter, a pair of TVs and a countdown clock. The area was alive with journalists, engineers, spokespeople, high-school students, Nasa retirees, congressmen - all interviewing, glad-handing, walking to the cafeteria and back, watching Nasa TV (an astronaut adhering globules of water to a mirror; cosmonauts drinking champagne), watching the clock.
I was called over to talk to Bob Bagdigian, a cheerful man from Alabama's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in charge of the newest piece of tech in Nasa's environmental-control and life-support system (ECLSS), a dumpster-sized machine that can reprocess wastewater, including sweat and urine, into drinking water. It is a critical piece of hardware if your goal is to create a long-term, self-sustaining human presence in space.
A near-scale mock-up was in the middle of the room. Jennifer Morcone, a public-affairs officer from Marshall, gave me a sample of the water. Bob said, "Some of that's me."
I took a sip. Weird aftertaste.
Bob replied, "Antimicrobial iodine. We put it in there for storage. It'll be removed." The "special potty", he explained, has a urinal hose system with "different interfaces for different-gendered crew".
As dusk arrived, a huge yellow Moon hung over 39-A. The xenonbathed shuttle glowed in the distance. An outdoor countdown clock was illuminated. Clusters of press and VIPs had begun to gather on a sloping lawn. Multiple newscasts were in the process of
?ling reports.
A voice said, "SRO is go."
Voice: "I do concur. Go for launch."
Voice: "Vehicle's in good shape, weather's beautiful, so on behalf of the entire launch team, good luck, Godspeed..."
The PA said, "Legacy... quest for knowledge... Godspeed... got launch... BLT has been cleared." Two minutes on the clock. A collectively held inhalation. An accentless female voice, futuristic in its clarity, uttered the words: "Ninety seconds to launch of space shuttle Endeavour... auto sequence set... 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, booster ignition, and liftoff of space shuttle Endeavour!"
The glow of the xenon lights surrounding the pad expanded into a marshmallow, then a half-circle of pure white light, in?ating to a thousand feet on either side, and then leaving the Earth, becoming a circle, rising up to meet the Moon, with a calligraphic black trail of smoke connecting it to the ground. We were all bathed in light and silence till the circle passed the Moon and the sound arrived: ?recrackers everywhere.
As the shuttle rose, the percussion of its solid rocket boosters ampli?ed until the sound took on a physical quality. The sound was rummaging around in the trees behind the press area. The shuttle was now at high altitude, with haloing clouds spreading out from its path. Soon it was a bright dot. Everyone applauded. A chopper landed in the parking lot.
Nearby was Jack King, known as the Voice of Apollo, whom decades ago millions had heard intone, "Liftoff. We have a liftoff.
Thirty-two minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11." King explained the halo clouds. "Ionisation, the vehicle stacking and compressing air, creating a shock wave. Never seen that before." He shook his head, paused. "Conditions were perfect."
I asked him, out of all the launches he had seen, how it ranked. "Twenty-seven. Ha. You didn't see Saturn V."
After leaving Kennedy I was scheduled to inspect infrastructure for the Constellation programme at three other space centres:
Marshall in Alabama, Stennis in Mississippi and Johnson in Houston.
The shuttle launch left me with a desire to go into space. I made some inquiries and was told I could do it - in a hollowed-out 727,
?own by a private contractor called Zero G. Only later did I discover that this aircraft was known as the Vomit Comet.
I planned my trip so that I'd have four days to visit the three space centres and then get to Washington DC, where I'd ?y 15 parabolas. My ?rst stop was Marshall, inside the Redstone Arsenal, a military base where signs said no knives or firearms and limit your movements. After arriving I was met by a public- affairs rep who said he'd convey me to "the Cedar Room".
I anticipated juleps and southern hospitality. This was the collaborative engineering and design-analysis room (known by an acronym, of course), where I was reunited with Jennifer Morcone.
She introduced me to Danny Davis, in charge of building and testing the upper stage of the new Ares I rocket, which will launch Constellation astronauts into orbit. He explained the complexity of the engineering, saying, "The good Lord gave us a really tough equation to solve." I mentioned a recent New York Times article describing a "chorus of naysayers" who believed Ares was a terrible solution, that its controversial solid-fuelled engine would vibrate dangerously, that it was being designed by autocrats convinced they could "mandate reality", that existing satellite-delivery rockets could be adapted to do the job just as well.
Davis told me simply, "We've made the right decision." And then added, "We need advocates."
As Jennifer Morcone and I drove around the centre's test stands and mock-ups, we encountered objects of biblical proportion, among them the vibration-test stand, 36 storeys high, where fully stacked rockets are put through launch simulations; a skyscraper-sized engine-test stand and "?ame bucket" designed to take 12 million lbs of thrust from an eventual Mars vehicle; and relics, huge Redstone and Atlas rockets, in a "rocket garden". Surveying this domain: a heroic sculpture of Wernher von Braun, Marshall's first director and the scientist behind the Saturn V rocket, decked out in a space suit and ready for the ?rst Nasa party on Mars.
The next morning, in Houston, I woke up early and headed for Johnson, where the following was disclosed: Orion, the Constellation crew capsule that is scheduled to replace the shuttle in 2015, is meant to splash down in the ocean but can also land on land. (The project manager told me, "I'm not saying it'll be fun - but they'll survive.") Constellation will launch two rockets almost simultaneously - the new Ares V will go up with 157,000 lbs of cargo for building the Moon base and, once Mission Control has veri?ed that all systems are go, then its companion, the Ares I, will go up with the crewed Orion capsule on top. Logos for Constellation were commissioned from a Star Trek: The Next Generation designer.
Then lunch at a conference table in a corner office with the top men on Constellation: Jeff Hanley, an elegant, self-contained midwesterner, and Doug Cooke, a ruddy, quiet Texan. It was a Last Supper of sorts. After our meeting, Hanley and Cooke were attending Constellation's budget-development meeting (at which the allocation of $6.9 billion would be determined). They were not looking forward to it.
I began by saying, "The public at large has no idea what the Constellation programme is or, really, that it even exists." Both men's faces sank into resigned sadness. They nodded beleagueredly at each other.
Then I asked if the Ares rockets might be a mistake.
Hanley, the midwesterner, cool and restrained, in an off-white suit jacket: "The Ares V's the biggest rocket anybody will have ever built. This gets lost in discussions of performance. To redesign and human-rate" - ie, make it safe for humans to ?y into orbit on it - "an existing launch vehicle would cost a lot of time.
There's a lot of momentum behind Ares. It'll improve crew safety by a factor of ten. Airlines have a one-in-10,000 fatality rate. The shuttle has a one-in-60 rate... as safe as getting in your car...
We're shooting for one in 1,000."
Cooke, in a blazer, from behind his lunch: "Preliminary design review went very well."
Hanley: "We're opening up all locations on the Moon for exploration. Apollo only went to the near side and equatorial regions." I asked about getting to Mars and, once there, how we would ever get back.
Hanley: "We can make fuel from the Martian atmosphere - that's simple chemistry."
Cooke: "There's an opportunity to send something to Mars every 26 months. It'll take six Ares V rockets to do a Mars mission. But
?rst we've got to close the life-support-system loop." Hence the Moon base, where lunar soil - regolith - will be converted to oxygen, water and fuel, and where options for growing food will be explored. "What about leaving the solar system?"
Hanley: "Barring some breakthrough... A hundred years ago, nobody would've guessed we'd go to the Moon. Visiting other planet bodies - that's why I'm here." Then, wistfully: "Seems like it's taking a long time."
In six missions, Apollo astronauts spent only 80 hours on the Moon. Constellation will take us back long-term, maybe permanently.
What will we do when we get there?
That afternoon, outside a grey building marked "Hangar X", I was given some answers. My informant was Robert Howard, a man in his mid-30s with a Van Dyke beard and a crew cut, who's in charge of "human factors" for the new lunar lander, called Altair. In the background loomed a hulking, steel, two-storey mock-up of the spacecraft, which will separate, Apollo-style, from a large command module and descend to the lunar surface. Howard's colleague, Clinton Dorris, the deputy project manager, said, "We brought Armstrong and the others to see this and they said, 'Holy smokes - it's huge!' It has three times the mass of Apollo's lander."
The three of us climbed through an air lock (airplane-lavatorysized) and into the crew module (twice as big).
Howard said, "We're a couple of generations out of phase from knowing how to get to the Moon." Translation: We've forgotten how to get there. We talked aviation and I said I was going on the Vomit Comet. "You guys ever been on?" Howard said, "I went on the Zero G one.
About 30 per cent of people throw up. It's always the people who don't take meds."
I started to feel claustrophobic. Three of us ?lled the entire crew module, yet there was supposed to be another astronaut and a ton of gear in the same volume when it was on the Moon.
Dorris, Howard and I drove over to another hangar to see the new lunar electric rover (LER), a long-range vehicle that will make wide swathes of the surface available to exploration. I'd imagined a buggy but found what looked like a party van mounted on a swivelling 12-wheeled chassis. We got in. A tall, rangy astronaut in a blue jumpsuit followed. This was Mike Gernhardt, head of the rover project, the man who'd piloted it in Obama's inaugural parade (and who hopes to drive it on the Moon someday). He stood up straight, so his head touched the roof.
Meanwhile, Howard was recon?guring the back of the rover to create a stateroom. He drew a curtain, made out of some proprietary Nasa material, that instantly cancelled all noise and light. Then he opened it to say, "There's a misting hose for sponge baths." He reclined the grey leatherette seats into beds and loungers.
Gernhardt said, "With a non-pressurised rover, you could only make short trips. But this one can go out for weeks. And I'll spend most of my time in shirtsleeves with a cup of coffee." He opened a medicine-cabinet-sized airlock at the rear and accessed a surface suit hanging off the rover. "I can step straight into it" - he grabbed a bar and half swung through - "close this airlock, depressurise and then walk outside. I did the ?rst spacewalk from the space station. It took me six hours to get out the door. Here I'll be able to do it in 20 minutes." He got in the driver's seat and said, "We had Humvees chasing us in the ?eld, and they could not keep up because of the terrain-crossing ability."
The rover is operated with ?ghter-pilot-style control sticks.
Every wheel can turn a full 360°. It also has huge blind spots.
Gernhardt pushed his stick forward. We glided smoothly out of the hangar - until we felt an impact and a voice over the radio said, "Mike, you hit a box."
Gernhardt switched on the air conditioning and said, "We're going to do excursions up to 1,000 kilometres long." A deep-sea diver who repaired oil platforms before joining Nasa, he has ?own four shuttle missions and is one of the most experienced astronauts at Nasa. We talked a bit back at the hangar. I asked him, "How much sleep do you actually get in space?" "You're so excited to be there. You're working your tail off.
Six hours. Sometimes two. Post-mission, I'm shot." He thought the Moon would be a much different environment, work- and stresswise. "With the new suit we'll go out for pleasure - just to take a walk.
Picture the games you can play. Lunar basketball; the high jump. We tried powering the rover with an ergometer, which is good exercise - you pedal in Fred Flintstone mode - and it worked. But we didn't get going very fast."
Forty-five miles east of New Orleans, at the Stennis Space Center (SSC), I was met by Paul Foerman, ?ftyish with a boyish face, my guide. Foerman and I took a government van for a "windshield tour". The place was enormous, surrounded by an "acoustical buffer zone" - 411 square miles that used to be forest, swamp and ?ve towns until the government took it over, turned the towns into ghosts and named it all after the state's most powerful senator. During one von Braun test at Stennis, involving 7.5 million lbs of Saturn V thrust, the reverberation was felt more than 100 miles away, in Baton Rouge, and broke the bank windows in the town of Picayune. Now shuttle and satellite-delivery engines are tested there. It will be a huge proving ground for Constellation.
We turned off Trent Lott Parkway and came round a corner, and I got a look at a structure more than twice as big as the biggest engine-test stand in Huntsville, a steel-and-concrete monolith with double ?ame buckets and a red control tower emblazoned with a huge meatball, like the burning-blue-and-bloodshot eye of a cyclops. I asked, "What's that?"
Foerman: "B stand."
Forty-three years ago, when Nasa hadn't yet launched an Apollo spacecraft, von Braun built this monster to hold in 12 million lbs of thrust, almost twice the capacity of the Saturn V. (He had even bigger plans in mind.) Pratt & Whitney was leasing it for the long term. "It's on the plate for Ares V tests."
The company's strategic-planning manager agreed to show us around. They were setting up to hoist an engine into position. No pictures, though, said Strategic Planning: "Lotta tech on that engine that we don't want other countries getting hold of."
We all took a lift to the top of the stand - warm on the ground, but 340 feet up we'd punctured another atmosphere. Out through some blast doors and the view carried on across Mississippi and deep into Louisiana. Someone pointed out a site where Nasa was building another stand for the Ares engine tests. Called A-3, it would be the ?rst large-scale test facility since Apollo. On to an engine plant. As we entered a room full of rocketry, Foerman shouted, "Shut off your phone!"
The plant manager explained why: "There are shunts on the pyrotechnics that are installed in our hot-gas drive assembly, and if the shunts should fail, then it would... uh... it would go off.
It's pyrotechnic. And that would not be good."
Finally, a quick tour of A-3 in the SUV of Lonnie Dutreix, project manager for A-3. Mostly steel girders, the stand resembled a bridge mistakenly built vertical. Dutreix: "I don't want to be the project manager who builds this facility and it doesn't work - got a big bungee-jumping stand here." If it works, it'll create a vacuum simulating atmospheric conditions at 100,000 feet, the altitude at which the second stage of the Ares I is expected to start. Being built by a Native American contractor, it called to mind the construction of Stennis itself - a Soviet-looking endeavour involving thousands of workers (and more mosquitoes). Of the workers back then, Dutreix said, "A lot of 'em just quit. They couldn't take it."
I arrived in DC the next morning, just in time to meet my plane - G-Force One - on the Tarmac at Dulles. A Zero G representative gave me a jumpsuit, then briefed me on safety. I'd already released them and Nasa from liability by signing a waiver that stated, "Inherent risks include... personal injury or illness (minor or serious) and/or death... resulting from weightlessness."
I boarded the plane with a couple of dozen other passengers, all quiet, except for a boisterous group of Mexicans. We entered by a staircase at the rear, through a military green snarl of cables, wires, hydraulics. The interior was completely covered in padding.
Ropes ran up and down the cabin, stopping at the back third, which was ?lled with seats. Everything was stowed, stripped bare, tied down. My seatmates were a neurologist and a Defense Department employee. The Mexicans, salesmen who'd sold hard and won this trip, sang. We all lay down on the ?oor, feet forward. Someone explained that at the end of each parabola we'd hear a shout: "Feet down, coming out!" - our cue to right ourselves and lie on our backs for a period of intensi?ed 1.8G.
The plane climbed steeply, then went over the top. Martian gravity. I weighed 65lbs! I was an eight-year-old with the strength of a man! The Mexicans did rapid-?re push-ups across from me! "Feet down!" I weighed over 300lbs! Now lunar! More feats of strength from Mexico! "Feet down!" Zero! Levitation! A kick in the head from someone. "Feet down!" Skateboarding moves I'd been trying my whole life - now effortless! Aerials! A perfect stalled handplant! "Feet down!" Zero G unleashed some toys! A blow?sh-like blue orb, a dog toy, whizzed by and I caught it, then hurled it at Jorge from Guerrero, who booted it back! I ?ew up toward the ceiling, somersaulted and lost track of which way was up - complete detachment of meaning from direction. Everyone was screaming and laughing. (Except one young woman, who was so sick she had to strap herself in for the rest of the weightlessness.)
I softly sailed up and over to one of G-Force One's two windows, in the emergency exits. Direction doesn't matter when you're weightless. Up and down are no longer markers. I suddenly understood how in space there is only everywhere. And this revelation was accompanied by the ?eeting physical knowledge of what it was to leave the Earth. I could move in any direction. All was calm and effortless. And to an astonishing degree - astonishing largely because the understanding was so matter-of-fact, as though I'd begun to internalise my own understated Neil Armstrong - this sort of comfort with wonder felt like the goal of both science and spirituality.
Sean Wilsey is the author of a memoir, Oh the Glory of It All*. He is working on a book about Nasa (and would like to go into space)*
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
