Jake Hadamard called Benacerraf. She was in her room in the Astronaut Office at JSC, poring over a technical reconstruction of the multiple failures that had destroyed Columbia’s APUs.
‘Hi. I’m here at JSC. Look, I need to talk to you. Can you get away?’
When she heard the Administrator’s dry voice, she felt pressure piling up on top of her, a force as tangible as the deceleration which had dragged her down into her canvas seat, during that last reentry from space. What now? ‘Do you want me to come over?’
‘No. Let’s get out of here, for a couple of hours. Meet me at the Public Affairs Office parking lot …’
It was a bizarre request, but Benacerraf sure as hell needed a break. She pulled on a light white sweatshirt and a broad-brimmed hat, and went out to the elevator.
It was three p.m. on a hot July afternoon.
She emerged into a Mediterranean flat heat – after the dry, cold air-conditioning it was like walking into a wall of dampness – and she was immersed in the steady chirp of crickets. She walked across the courtyard of the JSC campus towards Second Street, which led to the main gate.
The blocky black and white buildings of JSC were scattered over the landscaped lawns like children’s blocks, with big black nursery-style identifying numbers on their sides. Between the buildings were Chinese tallow trees and tough, thick-bladed, glowing green Texas grass; sprinklers seemed to work all the time, hissing peacefully, a sound that always reminded her of a Joni Mitchell album she’d gotten too fond of in her teenage years.
But JSC was showing its age. Most of the buildings were more than forty years old; despite the boldness of the chunky 1960s style the buildings themselves were visibly ageing, and after decades of budget cutbacks looked shabby: the concrete stained, the paint peeling. On her first visits here she’d been struck by the narrow corridors and gloomy ceiling tiles of many of the older buildings; it was more like some beat-up welfare agency than the core of a space program.
As he’d promised, Jake Hadamard was waiting for her at the car park close to the PAO. The lot was pretty full: old hands said wearily that there hadn’t been so much press interest in NASA since Challenger.
They piled into Hadamard’s car. It was a small ’oo Dodge. He drove out through the security barrier, down Second Street, and towards NASA Road One, the public highway. Hadamard grinned. ‘I have a limousine here I can use, with a driver,’ he said. ‘But my job is kind of diffuse. I like to be able to do things personally from time to time.’
Benacerraf said, ‘So, you drive for release.’
‘I guess.’
To the right of Second Street, which ran through the heart of JSC, was the Center’s rocket garden. There was a Little Joe – a test rocket for Apollo – and a Mercury-Redstone, looking absurdly small and delicate. The black-and-white-striped Redstone booster was just a simple tube, so slim the Mercury capsule’s heat shield overhung it. The Redstone was upright but braced against wind damage with wires; it looked, Benacerraf thought, as if it had been tied to the Earth, Gulliver-style. And, just before the big stone ‘Lyndon B Johnson Space Center’ entry sign at NASA One, they passed, on the right, the Big S itself: a Saturn V moon rocket, complete with Apollo, broken into pieces and lying on its side.
A small group of tourists, evidently bussed over from the visitors’ center, Space Center Houston, hung about in front of the Redstone. They wore shorts and baseball caps, and their bare skin was coated with image-tattoos, and they looked up at the Redstone with baffled incomprehension.
But then, Benacerraf thought, it was already more than four decades since Alan Shepard’s first sub-orbital lob in a tin can like this. Two generations. No wonder these young bedecked visitors looked on these crude Cold War relics with bemusement.
Hadamard pulled out onto NASA Road One, and headed west. As he drove he sat upright, his grey-blond hair close-cropped, his hands resting confidently on the wheel as the car’s internal processor took them smoothly through the traffic.
They cut south down West NASA Boulevard, and pulled off the road and into a park. Hadamard drove into a parking area. The lot was empty save for a big yellow school bus.
‘Let’s walk,’ Hadamard said.
They got out of the car.
The park was wide, flat, tree-lined, green. The air was still, silent, save for the sharp-edged rustle of crickets, and the distant voices of a bunch of children, presumably decanted from the bus. Benacerraf could see the kids in the middle distance, running back and forth, some kind of sports day.
Hadamard, wearing neat dark sunglasses and a NASA baseball cap, led the way across the field.
Benacerraf took a big breath of air, and swung her arms around in the empty space.
Hadamard grinned at her, and his shades cast dazzling highlights. ‘Feels like coming home, huh.’
‘You bet.’ She thought about it. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve walked on grass, except for taking short cuts across the JSC campus, since I got back from orbit.’
‘You should get out more.’ He scuffed at the grass with his patent leather shoes. ‘This is where we belong, after all. Here, on Earth, where we’ve spent four billion years adapting to the weather.’
‘So you don’t think we ought to be travelling in space.’
He shrugged, and patted at his belly. ‘Not in this kind of design. A big heavy bag of water. Spacecraft are mostly plumbing, after all … Humans don’t belong up there.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘Well, they don’t. You should hear what the scientists say to me. Every time someone sneezes on Station, a microgravity protein growth experiment is wrecked.’
Benacerraf said, ‘You’re repeating the criticisms that are coming out in the Commission hearings. You know, it’s like 1967 over again, after the Apollo fire.’
‘Yes, but back then they managed to restrict the inquiries afterward to a NASA internal investigation. And that meant they could keep most of the recommendations technical rather than managerial.’
Benacerraf grunted. ‘Neat trick.’
Hadamard laughed. ‘Well, the Administrator back then was a wily old fox who knew how to play those guys up on the Hill. But I’m no Jim Webb. After Challenger we had a Presidential Commission, just like the one that we’re facing now.’
They reached the woods, and the seagull-like cries of the children receded.
Eventually they came to a glade. A monument stood on a little square of bark-covered ground, enclosed by the trees, and the dappled sunlight reflected from its upper surface. It was box-like, waist high, and constructed of some kind of black granite.
It was peaceful here. She wondered what the hell Hadamard wanted.
Jake Hadamard took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and looked at Benacerraf. ‘Paula, do you know where you are? When I first came to work at NASA, I was struck by the –’ he hesitated ‘– the invisibility of the Challenger incident. I mean, there are plenty of monuments around JSC to the great triumphs of the past, like Apollo 11. Pictures on the walls, the flight directors’ retirement plaques, Mission Control in Building 30 restored 1960s style as a national monument, for God’s sake.
‘But Challenger might never have happened.
‘It’s the same if you go around the Visitors’ Center. You have your Lego exhibits and your Station displays and your pig-iron toy Shuttles in the playground, and that inspirational music playing on a tape loop all the time. But again, Challenger might never have happened.
‘Outside NASA, it’s different. For the rest of