So it was slightly after four in the morning in Russia when his report arrived. The mission controllers worked three shifts, of course, but their directors-the men and women who made the real decisions-were soundly sleeping when Li’s report began scrolling on the display screen of the chief controller for this shift.
He was a Russian who took his duties seriously. Sitting beside him at the console was his American counterpart, a perky redheaded engineer on loan from CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Shoulder to shoulder, they read the report from the expedition commander on the display screen, the American woman slightly impatient with her colleague’s slower pace at reading English. The mission control center was quiet and still at this hour. Even though all the stations were manned, there was little activity and less talk.
Until the American controller suddenly exclaimed, “He okayed it! Without checking with us?”
Eyes snapped wide and heads turned toward her.
The Russian chief controller said, “Dr. Li is within his authority…”
“The hell he is,” said the American. Her green eyes were blazing fury. “The protocol specifically states that any major change in the schedule must be cleared with mission control first!”
“Major change,” the Russian said mildly.
“You don’t think a six-hundred-kilometer diversion of that rover team is a major change?” She yanked the telephone from its receptacle on the console and began pecking out a number. “How much fuel does that buggy hold, anyway? Aren’t they putting themselves in danger of getting stranded?”
The Russian tapped the console keyboard, and the specifications for the Mars rover displaced Dr. Li’s report on their display screen.
“It has a cruising radius of one thousand kilometers,” he said. “More than half its mass is fuel. An enormous safety factor.”
“Not if they’re throwing in an unscheduled twelve hundred kilometers, it isn’t.”
“You are calling the chief mission director at this hour?”
“Hell no, I’m not that crazy,” the American answered, a slight grin breaking through her anger. “I’m calling Houston.”
The Russian smiled back at her. “Ah-and they will wake up the chief.”
“Right. I may be quick-tempered but I’m not stupid.”
HOUSTON: The chain of command on Earth was split, like everything else about the Mars mission, into two strands. While mission control was in Kaliningrad, there was a “shadow” mission control team at the old NASA center at Clear Lake, near Houston.
The center had been created in the early nineteen-sixties as a political plum for Texas. Originally designated the Manned Space Center and built nearly an hour’s drive from downtown Houston, the center became the home of the astronauts, the place where all manned space activities were planned and directed. Eventually it was named after Lyndon B. Johnson. As Vice-President, Johnson had chaired John F. Kennedy’s space council and pushed vigorously for the daring program to land Americans on the moon within the decade of the sixties.
But no matter how swiftly the engineers moved, the tides of history swirled faster. By the time the first astronauts set foot on the moon, Kennedy was dead and his successor, Johnson, out of office. The American space program, seemingly at the peak of success, was being gutted and virtually murdered, a victim of the Vietnam War that Johnson had escalated.
Yet the Johnson Space Center remained and even grew. As the hub of all manned space activities, it became headquarters for the hundreds of astronauts recruited to fly the space shuttle and its successors. Men and women trained there before they were allowed to ride up to the American space station Freedom or any of the foreign (or even private) space stations that orbited the Earth.
At first glance the Johnson Space Center looked rather like a university campus. Modernistic glass-walled buildings and green lawns, a relaxed atmosphere, young men and women strolling from one building to another or driving their cars along the wide tree-lined streets. At the main entrance, though, there rested a mammoth Saturn V rocket, a relic of the old Apollo era, lying on its side like a beached whale. And behind the tall towers of glass and steel were smaller windowless buildings that hummed with electrical power and the throbbing of pumps and motors.