Back to the Moon-ARC

Chapter 3

“Where’s Bill?” Astronaut Jim England was looking for his longtime friend. England was a tall, lanky man with a noticeable “hillbilly” accent that he seemed able to turn off and on at will depending upon the situation. Presently, his pronunciation of “Bill” would make listeners swear it was a two-syllable word. He’d known Stetson since their first flight to the International Space Station together back in the shuttle days and had immediately become a part of Stetson’s inner circle of close friends. England never seemed to meet anyone he didn’t like, and almost everyone responded to his warm personality by counting him as a friend.

“Hi, Jim.” Stetson’s secretary looked up from her computer screen at the astronaut. She had been Stetson’s secretary, or, to be politically correct, his management support assistant, for almost five years. Married for over thirty years, with a grandchild on the way, Millie Lawford was cordial, worldly wise, and very good at her job.

“How’re things?” England asked. “You look perplexed.”

“Bill’s calendar.” She grunted as she tapped at her keyboard and then clicked her mouse several times. “It’s a frustrating experience that I’d say is more like herding cats while being overrun by mice than trying to actually schedule adult professionals in the same place at the same time.” She managed a smile for England.

“Ha.” Jim laughed out loud. “Try tuna and milk.”

“He’s in the office. Shall I tell him you’re here?” She started to rise from her seat.

“No, that’s okay,” Jim said. “I’ll go on in. Unless you think I shouldn’t?”

“No, I’m sure it’s fine. Go on in.” She looked back at her screen, forgetting about Jim, and immediately frowned. “NASA just has too many meetings,” she half muttered to herself. “How the heck is he possibly supposed to be in all these places in one short ten-hour day?”

“Good luck.” England shook his head. Taking her inattention to him as dismissal, he walked up to the closed simulated-wood-grain door to Bill Stetson’s all-too-government-issue office. He knocked on the door and reached to open it in one quick, fluid motion. If Stetson were doing something that he didn’t want anyone to see, then he would certainly be caught by surprise.

Fortunately, Stetson was simply sitting at his desk looking at his thirty-inch computer monitor with a mild grin upon his face. He looked up and motioned for Jim to join him on the other side of the desk.

Stetson, though an astronaut and commander of the next flight to the Moon, the first flight “back to the Moon,” was still only a civil servant and subject to civil-service rules regarding office space and accoutrements. The simulated-wood-grain desk and generic cream-colored filing cabinets were the primary features of the room. On the walls were framed pictures of a shuttle launch, the International Space Station, Stetson floating in the U.S. Laboratory Module of the ISS, and many, many pictures of his wife and two children. In the family photos, there were none that didn’t have Stetson surrounded by the satellites that were his family. And in all of them, his wife and children wore great big smiles.

Jim rounded the corner of the desk and heard a voice talking from what sounded like a deep well. The audio was crackly. He knew what he was listening to an instant before he saw the screen and had his guess confirmed. From the speakers came “…forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.” The voice of Gene Cernan trailed off as Stetson pressed the pause on the touch screen.

“Watching Apollo 17 again?” Jim smiled and shook his head at the same time. “God, how many times have you watched that video? A hundred times?” He reached behind Stetson and pulled forward a chair. Though good-naturedly teasing his friend, he didn’t really take his own eyes from the screen as he sat down. After all, no modern astronaut had ever made it higher than a few hundred miles above Earth. Cernan had walked on a body about two hundred and forty thousand miles away. What astronaut wouldn’t be in awe of the Apollo-era groundbreakers?

“I have no idea what you are talking about, Jim. This is the first time I ever saw this,” Stetson replied with a smile. He pulled himself to an upright position and turned to face his friend.

“You know how long it has taken us to get here. Jesus, what took so long?” Jim said. “You know, I’ve been thinking about the Moon since I was a twelve-year-old kid listening to Reagan announce that NASA was going to build a space station. To think that man walked on the Moon just a year or so before I was born is almost bizarre.”

“Hell, Jim, I was five the first time I saw this, and it was live. If we wait much longer I’m gonna be too freakin’ old.” Stetson pointed to the frozen image of the lunar surface. “I’m ready. I’ve never been more ready, and I’m getting impatient.”

“Amen shouted somebody from the choir,” England replied. They’d had this conversation, or a variant of it, many times before, pretty much as long as they had known each other.

“Mankind just does stuff in fits and starts historically. We went to the Moon for a grand total of three years and then stopped. We just stopped! We took apart the greatest machines ever built by man and put them in museums. Heck, one of them is standing up as a marker for the Alabama/Tennessee state line. Can you believe that?” There were Saturn V rockets in the museums across the country and the Saturn IB at the Alabama Welcome Center.

“Been there. Seen ’em.” Jim could tell what sort of mood Bill was in. He’d also heard this part before.

“Did you know that that SOB Nixon decided to kill the Apollo program before Armstrong ever set foot on the Moon? I guess he just couldn’t stand the thought of Kennedy getting all the credit. What a vindictive sonofa—”

“Whoa, just a minute here.” This direction for the conversation was a twist on the usual one. “This is a new one, Bill. What the hell are you talking about? Nixon?” Though they had talked about how the lunar missions should have continued so that today they’d be having this discussion about going to Mars, and not back to the Moon, Nixon being an SOB had not come up before. At least not in this context.

Stetson stood up, unconsciously (perhaps) putting himself into the mode where whomever was around had no choice but to listen to what he had to say. Jim was used to it and wasn’t intimidated in the least. He knew Stetson too well for that; he was just curious about what his friend was going on about.

“Think about it. Yes, Apollo was expensive and there was the Vietnam War going on. Those were tough years, with riots, assassinations, protests, and all that crap to contend with. But Tricky Dick could look past all that and see what mattered to him, not the good of the country or future generations—just to good old Tricky Dick.” He reached down and picked up from his desk his model of the Apollo lunar lander.

Holding the lander in his left hand and motioning at Jim with his right, he began again. “Nixon was president of the United States—the highest achievement that anyone can aspire to. He’d done it. He’d beaten his adversaries and was riding high. And every time there was a new story on television about the upcoming Moon landings, what did he see?” Stetson paused for effect, not really to allow Jim to answer his somewhat rhetorical question.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What?” Jim didn’t really care to offer his own opinion, since he wasn’t sure what might tweak his friend too far at the moment.

“He saw another president getting all the credit. He saw John Fitzgerald Kennedy standing at the podium over at Rice University saying, ‘We choose to go the Moon in this decade and do the other thing.…’ He saw or heard JFK whenever or wherever the Apollo program came up. And that simply burned him. And do you know why it burned him?”

Jim decided to just keep his mouth shut. He leaned back in his chair and slumped a little to relax. Politics never seemed to help the space program, and bitching about it was almost as fruitful. He decided to just ride the storm out.

“Do you know who ran against John Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960? That election was the closest election in modern history—until the election of George Bush in 2000, that is. Do you know who he beat to become president?”

All England could do was shrug. He knew his American history fairly well, but keeping a mental log of who lost presidential elections was not among the facts that he’d memorized in order to pass the public-school history exams.

“Well, and the kicker, there was controversy about some ballet-box stuffing throwing some doubt on the election outcome even!” Stetson sat the lander back on his desk, thinking to himself, Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. He smiled inwardly and then answered his own question. “Richard Milhous Nixon. Kennedy beat Mr. Nixon for the presidency, just barely, in 1960. Nixon even made a statement saying something about the country didn’t need the turmoil of an investigation into the election at that time.”

“I don’t recall ever hearing that in school,” Jim said with a raised eyebrow.

“It’s true. Look it up. So, what do you think Mr. Nixon thought about when he was president at one of the greatest moments in human history and the guy who beat him, perhaps questionably, almost a decade previously—a guy who had been dead for years—was getting all the credit? Do you think that made the man who kept an enemies list happy? No way! The SOB must’ve seethed at the thought, and I am convinced the old man had neither sympathy nor remorse for ending the Apollo program. He probably said good riddance.” Stetson walked a few steps to his window overlooking the complex of the Johnson Space Center. “And that’s why we’re just now going back to the Moon instead of Mars.”

“Ha, ha!” England guffawed. “Bill, that makes some crazy-conspiracy sense, but I cannot imagine that’s how it came down. The cost of the war, the civil-rights movement, and the Cold War—NASA just became too expensive, and people lost interest. It got boring.”

“Well…” Stetson, still looking out at the mid-day sun, seemed to have his sails deflated by his friend’s comment. Jim was just glad that it seemed to be calming him down.

“Come on, Bill,” Jim said. “The U.S. was slipping into a recession then, too. Science fiction movies made space look sexier than the astronauts could. It was a whole bunch of forcing functions in a very complex dynamic system that caused the Moon missions to stop. Apollo 13 was preempted on television during primetime, and that was long before Cernan and Schmitt’s flight. I don’t think it was Nixon at all.”

Stetson said, “Yeah. All those things are true. Once you’ve gone to the Moon, what else can there be? How do you top that? NASA was given a tough act to follow—its own.”

England said, “Think about it. James T. Kirk was going to other star systems and hooking up with hot green chicks. All those Apollo guys ever did was bring home some rocks. The public got more out of the price of a movie ticket or a television show than NASA was delivering with their publicly perceived giant budget.”

“And you and I both know that NASA’s budget is tiny compared to most every other entitlement program or congressional boondoggle.”

“True.”

Stetson continued. “Only NASA can make the most complex and challenging endeavor in the history of humankind seem dull. Maybe we should’ve hired George Lucas or Steven Spielberg to do our marketing. Sure, we had great coverage for the last shuttle flight, with lots of legacy stories about the successes and failures of the shuttle program. Though if I’d had to see that video of the Challenger exploding again, I think I’d have puked.”

“No hot green chicks,” Jim interjected. “We need some hot green chicks. I think they were called green animal women slaves from Orion or some such thing. Yep, we need ’em.”

Bill ignored the comment and kept on going, “Yes, it was a tragedy, and yes, mistakes were made, but we’ve got to get over it someday and move forward. Think how insulting it must be to the thousands of engineers who made sure that those other one hundred and twenty flights were flown safely. What about the video that shows their successes?”

“Uh, people like a train wreck,” Jim reminded him.

“Humph.” Bill was on a roll and wasn’t ready to relinquish the floor just yet. “And what about the first manned flight of Ares I? The press was there with cameras rolling to see the rocket fly, but I think they’d have been just as eager to see it crash. They probably had their commentaries written for that before they even arrived at the Cape…and the astronauts’ obituaries, too. We were lucky the second flight made the news at all. If it hadn’t been for the Chinese having a launch failure the week before, I doubt we’d have rated high enough to report on.

“So, now we’ve flown over a hundred space shuttle missions, circling our tails in Earth orbit for decades. We’ve built a space station that people have been living in for fifteen years with the public’s perception that they were just floating around twiddling their thumbs and having fun eating floating globules of liquid astronaut food. We’re rebuilding a capability to go the Moon that we had—we had, mind you—when I was a child and then threw away.” Stetson almost looked angry as he turned to face England. Jim hated seeing his friend getting so worked up.

“Water under the bridge, buddy. Now, if we can manage to find some of those green animal—”

Bill cut him off with a very Spock-like raised eyebrow that told Jim he was about to push a little too far. “Jim, we’ve wasted fifty years since Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. Yeah, we’ve done some science, and we’ve supposedly learned about how people will ultimately survive the trip to Mars. I’d never say it in public, but we’ve wasted the legacy of Von Braun and all those engineers who put us on another world before you were born. I want to get back to the Moon and prove to the American people that space exploration is worth it. That going to Mars is doable and worth it. And that going to Mars should not wait another fifty years. Going to the Moon is the first step toward that, and it is what I’m meant to do.”

“Me, too, Bill. Me, too.” Jim smiled at his friend because he didn’t doubt his last statement for an instant.