This new ocean, p.90
This New Ocean, page 90
That same year, 1994, a slew of companies including Boeing, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, General Electric, Rocketdyne, TRW, Grumman, IBM, and Thiokol were working with various NASA centers to finalize the station design. Some were also placing advertisements in newspapers and magazines that said in so many words that the station would create jobs, or could help cure terrible illnesses, and would be wonderful for science. Boeing, a prime contractor with 730 employees working on the station and a contract worth more than $1.5 billion, waged a prolonged and aggressive public relations campaign for the International Space Station, as it was being called in 1994 (the Russians had by then contracted to supply the vehicle’s service module and other hardware, plus help to service it, so the name Freedom, now a provocative holdover from the cold war, was quietly dropped.)
A “Progress Report” issued by Boeing early in 1994 raved about the science that would be performed on the station. It said that more than six hundred experiments had been proposed for the orbiting laboratory. A number of them, including the isolation of proteins in perfect crystals for use in a technique called crystallography, which uses X rays to examine the structure of atoms and molecules, promised a “significant reward” in fighting disease. Knowing that the station was taken to be a cannibal by most of the science community, the public relations people in the Boeing Defense & Space Group crafted a twenty-six page “Media Advisory” packed with the purported scientific benefits that they claimed would come from the station.21 The report was passed out at the important American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Francisco that year. So were single-page flyers printed for individual states (Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, and California) asserting that “75,000 to 100,000 jobs depend directly or indirectly on Space Station nation-wide” and that it would ensure the country’s economic competitiveness, inspire young people, bring breakthroughs in health care, monitor the environment and, as usual, provide a slew of “commercial spin-offs.”
There were even comic books. Adventures on Space Station Freedom, which appeared in 1989 as the Evil Empire was starting to come apart, not only described the scientific and exploratory panacea the station represented but claimed that it would bring the peoples of Earth together (with the notable exception of Communists from the U.S.S.R., China, Cuba, and elsewhere). In one story, four young international science fair winners flew to the station on the shuttle Discovery and met their adult astronaut counterparts: Michelle, from the European Space Agency; John, a black from the District of Columbia; Juanita, a payload scientist from Houston; Divinity, from Canada; Elton S. Ono, a scientist from Japan; and others. (The similarity between Elton S. Ono and Ellison S. Onizuka, the Japanese American who had been killed on Challenger, was unmistakable.)
But no amount of public relations could obscure the fact that by early 1997, mounting delays caused mainly by cost overruns and by the Russians’ inability to deliver the station’s service module for lack of $100 million in appropriations by the Duma, was all but killing the possibility of doing serious experiments until well after 2000. The overruns forced NASA to dip into its own science fund and pull out almost half a billion dollars for use on other hardware, while the Kremlin and the legislature struggled not only to come up with the Russian Federation’s share of the funding but to find ways of explaining to their devastated countrymen why they were willing to spend precious rubles on yet another space venture but not take immediate steps to reduce the misery and squalor on the ground.
The explanation was that partnership in joint space operations not only would continue to bring prestige to their country but would make more than it cost by leading to the sale of rocket engines, Proton launches, reconnaissance imagery, and other goods and services. Like Slavic Willy Lomans, the new Russian space merchants set off on capitalism’s dangerous road trying desperately to get their collective foot into the world market’s front door.
But the cold war had been hideously expensive, and its bill was now due from winner and loser alike. Most of the winners, many thousands of whom were being painfully “downsized” out of their jobs as the economy adjusted, tended to think that sending people to space in fabulously expensive machines for no compelling reason was as wasteful as it was irrelevant.
“It is disconcerting to look up from the bottom line of Form 1040 to read in your news article on April 5 [1997] that the Government I am financing has just launched another shuttle shot,” a Columbia University law professor complained in a letter to The New York Times. “The primary scientific mission of this one, I gather, is to light a match in a weightless environment. The appetite of science is voracious, and a good thing, too, I’m sure. But how much (in this impoverished world) is it worth to play with fire while floating around in a spacecraft? You have written that the cost to us 1040 writers is between $300 million and $500 million per flight.… I wish you would keep telling us just how much each of these space games costs—especially those like the latest that seem to have been lofted mainly for the fun of it.”
It was not for fun. The professor referred to Columbia’s sixteen-day science mission that had begun on April 4; he had possibly been put off by reading that a launch controller had told the crew, “Enjoy your on-orbit spring break.” But it was no break. Of thirty-three experiments conducted during the flight, the most important involved setting scores of small fires in insulated chambers to see how they behaved in weightlessness.
This was anything but frivolous. Rapid decompression and fire are space-farers’ two worst nightmares. Flame acts far differently, and much more dangerously, in a weightless environment than it does in gravity. A candle that burns for five to ten minutes on Earth can turn into a ball of flame that radiates heat and light for forty-five minutes in orbit because of simple diffusion. Fire and its effects were tested in space as early as 1975 on Skylab and on shuttles in 1990, 1992, and 1996. The tests showed that fire spreads especially fast on paper and plastic in orbit and that polyurethane foam easily smolders with little exposure to flame and gives off much higher levels of carbon monoxide than on Earth. In February 1997—only six weeks before the fire tests on Columbia—a flash fire caused by a ruptured oxygen generator on Mir sent one-to-four-foot-long flames into the cabin, chunks of molten metal splattering against a bulkhead, and noxious smoke into the air. Since astronauts and a cosmonaut had died in fires even before they got to space, both the Soviet and American programs studied the matter intensively. NASA still does.
At any rate, the losers—the Russians—whose tattered ranks included frail old women begging for money on street corners, soldiers and scientists who went months without being paid, and a soaring adult mortality rate brought on by alcoholism, poor nutrition, and a health care system in near collapse, thought that sending people to space was contemptible if they thought about it at all. The International Space Station was taken to be an obscene indulgence by a cynical elite that was out of touch with ordinary people.
Cyclops in the Sky
The Hubble Space Telescope had a tortured history to match the station’s. It was the brainchild of Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer Jr., who had first proposed it in a RAND report in 1946, and was named after the American astronomer who did pioneering work on the expansion of the universe.*
During the forty-four years before it was carried into orbit by Discovery on April 24, 1990, the largest, most complex, and most powerful observatory ever sent to space survived enough near-death experiences to make it the hero of one of the old dime novels. (Astronomer R. S. Richardson’s idea to put a three-hundred-inch telescope on the Moon for the same reason Spitzer wanted to put one into orbit was in fact published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940.)
By the early 1960s, shrewd NASA technocrats were supporting what was then called the Large Orbital Telescope and then the Large Space Telescope as an integrated component of their cherished shuttles and space station, but soon ran into the usual budget problems on Capitol Hill. Seeing the intensity of the politics that erupted over the telescope, largely because it was a vastly expensive “big science” enterprise, Fred Whipple quipped that it should be called the “Great Optical Device,” which would have given it the politically appealing acronym GOD.27 Instead, it was renamed for Hubble in 1983, after nearly two decades of intermittent fighting in nearly every corner. There were battles with Congress over funding, within the space agency itself over its design and operation, and with the Department of Defense, which vehemently insisted that related Keyhole satellite technology such as optics and solar panels could not be shared with uncleared civilians. The engineers working on Keyhole knew that their counterparts working on Hubble would have problems—with its solar arrays, for example—but never told them, even though doing so would have had no bearing on national security. It was a classic example of how compartmenting information could drive up the cost of a program.
NASA’s Office of Advanced Research and Technology fought with its Office of Space Science for control of Hubble’s development. And the Space Telescope Science Institute itself, which would operate the telescope, was to be headed by Riccardo Giacconi, a brilliant, fiercely independent X-ray astronomer who engendered what one historian called a “love-hate relationship” between the institute and headquarters. Giacconi, whose boss at Harvard called him “aggressive even to the point of being difficult to deal with,” would easily match Pickering as a source of irritation and frustration in Washington.
The white hat–black hat division was particularly ludicrous because the telescope was manufactured by the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, which also built KH-9 “Big Bird” reconnaissance satellites at the same site (but in different clean rooms). In fact, the forty-three-foot-long, 25,500-pound orbiting observatory is roughly the size of the KH-9 and uses the same basic primary mirror–secondary mirror Cassegrain design as the KH-11s and their successors.
But NASA itself managed to turn what would ultimately become one of science’s most extraordinary devices into a self-inflicted wound. By insisting that the telescope be both launched and serviced by shuttles, it not only made the device dependent on the fragile lifter to reach orbit (Hubble’s launch was set back four years because of the Challenger disaster) but kept it leashed to a relatively low 330-nautical-mile-orbit because that was an altitude the shuttle could reach for house calls. A higher orbit would have doubled the observation time.
In 1976, when the space agency bent to congressional pressure to leave Hubble out of its budget altogether, the noted Princeton astrophysicist John N. Bahcall wrote to Fletcher to complain that it looked as if NASA was more interested in supporting its own institutional needs (the shuttle) than “wider goals.” As it turned out, the cost of designing and building Hubble between 1977 and 1986—roughly $1.54 billion—was triple the original estimate. A big chunk of that money went to the Perkin-Elmer Corporation of Danbury, Connecticut, which submitted a ludicrously low bid of $70 million to build what would turn out to be a badly flawed primary mirror. And in an acrimonious book appropriately titled The Hubble Wars, Eric J. Chaisson, an astrophysicist who worked on Hubble, charged that NASA both neglected sharing space telescope data with the nation’s schoolchildren and outlandishly hyped its capability. He labeled as “patently false” the space agency’s claim that Hubble would “see seven times farther than other telescopes.” Hubble’s great advantage, Chaisson knew, would be to operate so far above the atmosphere that it would see more clearly than ground-based telescopes, not farther.
If the Hubble Space Telescope’s gestation period was convulsive, its debut was an out-and-out calamity. A month after it was launched, when it effectively first opened its eye in what astronomers call “first light” and peered at a star cluster known as NGC 3532 in the constellation Carina, it sent back not a clear image but a sharp spike of light surrounded by a huge halo and strange tendrils of light coming out of the central core.35 The picture, it soon became apparent to the thunderstruck scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and other insiders, was hopelessly out of focus. Six months later, a NASA board headed by JPL Director Lew Allen found that the “spherical aberration” had happened because Perkin-Elmer not only had polished the 94.5-inch primary mirror incorrectly but had not tested it enough. So much for what one of the firm’s losing competitors called its “sinful” lowball bidding. It got $437 million for the flawed mirror.
Chaisson called what followed a “public relations cruise through hell” as the “techno-turkey”—the orbital Mr. Magoo—became the target of cartoonists, politicians, headline writers, and late-night comedians from coast to coast.38 “Pix nixed as Hubble sees double,” one newspaper proclaimed, while another called the telescope “one sick puppy!” “Hubble is working perfectly,” said the host of NBC’s Tonight Show, “but the universe is all blurry.” One cartoonist drew six dopey-looking people holding a sign upside down that read: “Hubble Space Telescope Optical Design Group.” A New York Times editorial writer called the HST a “myopic chunk of orbiting glass.” The House of Representatives was now as convinced as much of the public that big science was irredeemably quirky, wasteful, and mostly irrelevant because of ghastly blunders like Hubble. It was equally convinced that NASA was incompetent, so it put the kibosh on George Bush’s year-old, $100 billion plan to send Americans back to the Moon and then on to Mars by draining all start-up money out of the space agency’s budget tank.
The Ghoul Strikes Again
But, as usual, it was infinitely worse in Russia. On November 16, 1996—eight months to the day after a second Russian space auction was held at Sotheby’s—the Russians were hit yet again trying to get to Mars. Mars 96, a $300 million mission that involved twenty nations and a whole decade of planning (mostly because of budget problems), abruptly ended when its Proton booster’s fourth stage failed to restart after its first burn, dumping the complex spacecraft into the Pacific.
The French and Germans were consternated. The members of the Russian Space Agency, who were by then desperately trying to reestablish at least some of the old credibility, and who thought of partnerships with the United States, European nations, and some others the way drowning people think of life preservers, went into collective shock. A number of them would have known—but would definitely not have told their foreign partners—that parts of Mars 96 had been integrated at Tyuratam in the glow of kerosene lamps because the Kazakhs had cut off the electricity in exasperation over a pile of unpaid bills. Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president, said in 1997 that Moscow owed the equivalent of $460 million for four years’ rent. That was only one symptom of a deep and widespread poverty and demoralization that was killing the program.
Russia ranked second to last in spending (after India) out of twenty nations that were active in space research in 1996, the Russian Space Agency’s general director, Yuri Koptev, announced bitterly. The United States spent a little more than $12 billion on civilian space programs that year, while France and Japan each spent roughly $2 billion and Russia roughly $700 million. Of twenty-seven civil missions the space agency had hoped to conduct in 1996, he told Parliament while pleading for a $1.1 billion budget for 1997, only eleven had actually been launched. And between 1990 and 1996, Koptev added, still pelting the legislators with statistics, almost half of the engineers and technicians in the space program had deserted it because they could not live on an average salary of one hundred dollars a month. The sorry state of the Russian space program could have been the sole subject of a course in a business school. It showed in the clearest way where space goes on the priority list of a country that is severely squeezed financially. Like supporting the arts or caring for the environment, space was taken to be a luxury affordable only in good times.
The picture Koptev painted did not bode well for his country’s participation in the International Space Station by then under advanced development, since it was supposed to contribute 38 percent of the hardware and the equivalent of $3.3 billion (versus $17 billion by the United States, $3.2 billion by ESA, and $3 billion by Japan). If funding did not increase, Koptev warned, there was a distinct possibility that Russia would bail out of the international station and abandon Mir and human spaceflight altogether by 2000.
It was no idle threat. As he spoke, Atlantis was being loaded with nearly 3,600 pounds of supplies for Mir, 43 percent of it food and clothing, plus 1,400 pounds of water. The Russian space station was now dependent on the American shuttle for resupply. That is how bad it was.
Then it got worse. Early in 1997, time and the severely shrunken budget began to catch up with the world’s only space station, then in its eleventh year in orbit (it had been designed to fly for five). Life on Mir had never been especially easy. It had logged about 1,500 malfunctions since its launch in 1986, most of them routine, while orbiting Earth roughly 65,000 times. Michael Foale, an American astronaut who was in orbit with Vasily Tsibliyev and Aleksandr Lazutkin at the time, compared living on Mir to camping out in a dirty old car. The United States paid Russia $470 million to let astronauts build up flying time on Mir in preparation for crewing the International Space Station. Dr. Norman Thagard became the first American to fly on Mir when he went up on a Soyuz TM in March 1995. He was collected by Atlantis 115 days later. Shannon W. Lucid came back to Earth on Atlantis in September 1996 after setting a six-month record, and the same ship delivered her replacement, John E. Blaha, who started his own four-month mission that same day.
But Mir ran into the Ghoul in February and was severely pummeled. On the twenty-third, a backup oxygen generator, called a “candle” because its lithium perchlorate burns like one as it releases oxygen, caused a serious fire that sent molten metal flying and filled the station with smoke. The Russians downplayed the accident. But astronaut Jerry Linenger, who was on board at the time, said later that the long flames had threatened to burn through the station’s wall. In March, the main oxygen generator failed and leaking coolant loops sent the temperature of the main living module up to a toasty eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. In April, the main air-purification system began leaking antifreeze, overheated, and had to be shut down for fear of another fire.
